The Political Space of Art: The Dardenne Brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial 1783485698, 9781783485697

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The Political Space of Art

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Experiments/On the Political Series Editor: Iain MacKenzie This series reflects on the political in interdisciplinary and/or practice-led ways on the assumption that crossing these borders of the discipline can create the conditions for experimental thinking about politics and the political.

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The Political Space of Art The Dardenne Brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial

Benoıˆt Dillet and Tara Puri

London • New York

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright  2016 Benoıˆt Dillet and Tara Puri All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8567-3 PB 978-1-7834-8568-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dillet, Benoıˆt, author. 兩 Puri, Tara, author. Title: The political space of art : the Dardenne brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial / Benoıˆt Dillet and Tara Puri. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., 2016. 兩 Series: Experiments/on the political 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012573 (print) 兩 LCCN 2016012623 (ebook) 兩 ISBN 9781783485673 (cloth : alk. paper) 兩 ISBN 9781783485680 (pbk. : alk. paper) 兩 ISBN 9781783485697 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Politics in art. 兩 Dardenne, Jean-Pierre, 1951—Criticism and interpretation. 兩 Dardenne, Luc, 1954—Criticism and interpretation. 兩 Ai, Weiwei—Criticism and interpretation. 兩 Burial (Musician)—Criticism and interpretation. 兩 Roy, Arundhati—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC NX650.P6 D55 2016 (print) 兩 LCC NX650.P6 (ebook) 兩 DDC 704.9/4932—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012573

 ⬁ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction The Political Gesture Encroachments The Road Map

1 3 5 7

1

Aesthetics, Poetics and Techno-Aesthetics From Aesthetics to Poetics For a Critique of Techno-Aesthetics

13 15 18

2

Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers Broken Cities Woods Motorways What Is a Left-over Space?

29 29 36 38 40

3

Arundhati Roy’s Language of Politics The Hyphenated Writer The Cracks of a Generation Naming into Existence Bearing Witness

47 47 52 56 61

4

Ai Weiwei’s Useless Materials The Weight of a World Forging Time Living Under the Lengthening Shadows Material Qualities

67 67 73 76 80

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Contents

Burial’s Muffled Soundscape of London 87 Prelude to the Rave 87 In the Headphones-Ear Interstice 89 Departing from Nostalgia and Hauntology 92 Metallic Sound 94 Untrackable Tracks 96 After Untrue, In Search of the New 98 Hardcore Continuum Redux 103 Becoming ‘The Name of a Tune’ and the Underground Condition 104

Conclusion

111

Bibliography

115

Index

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1

Steelscape along the Meuse, 2006.

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Figure 2.2

Industries around Seraing, 2006.

34

Figure 3.1

Pradip Krishen, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, 1989.

48

Pradip Krishen, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, 1989.

51

Figure 4.1

Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008–2012 (detail).

69

Figure 4.2

Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008–2012 (detail).

71

Figure 4.3

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010.

72

Figure 4.4

Ai Weiwei, Grapes, 2010 (detail).

75

Figure 5.1

Burial, Untrue, 2007.

90

Figure 3.2

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Iain MacKenzie, who has seen the many shapes this book has taken and been excited about it throughout. Thanks also to Rod Edmond for his constant encouragement and support. Our long and invigorating discussions with the Nootechnics collective and Bernard Stiegler have contributed much to this book. Early drafts of some of the chapters were presented at seminars held by the School of English and the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent, and the inimitable ‘Lentil Seminars’ organised by Sean Sayers and David McLellan: our preliminary thoughts turned into arguments in these friendly spaces. Thanks as well to Vinita Chandra and Mukul Mangalik who invited us to speak to their students about Burial’s music at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. An earlier version of chapter 2 first appeared in Film-Philosophy. We want to thank in particular Pradip Krishen and Arundhati Roy for sharing with us the film stills from In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Ai Weiwei for permission to reproduce his artwork, and Burial and Hyperdub Records for allowing us to use the Untrue album cover and various quotations. During the long gestation period of the book, many friends and colleagues provided warm conversations that led us to think more deeply about politics and art. We would like to thank Giorgios, Tina, Gautier, Charles, Alex, Fanny, Aditya, Robert, Nikos and Jason for their warmth and generosity. Our families, Mapie, Antoine, Julia, Romain, Maria, Teji, Ajit, Surasti, Lakhinder, Miti, Bin, Uday and Surya gave us the love and support that made us see this project through to the end. Bruno and Harbans, who would have taken such pride in this book, are unfortunately not here to see it in print. This book is dedicated to them.

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Introduction

How will sensation be able to sufficiently turn in on itself, relax or contract itself, so as to capture these nongiven forces in what it gives us, to make us sense these insensible forces, and raise itself to its own conditions? It is in this way that music must render nonsonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible. —Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation1

This book is not about space per se, neither is it about the thematics of space in art. Its title is a gesture to Maurice Blanchot’s book The Space of Literature, a collection of studies on literature, where he reflects on the intertwined relationship of literature to life, what makes literature work and the demands that it makes on our attention.2 We did not choose this title; it imposed itself upon us. The same goes for the artists included in this book; we did not choose them, but it is by encountering their work that it became evident to us that they would co-exist with us for a while. For Blanchot, literature exists as such, and it is this virtuality that gives it a spatiality. We use the term ‘space’ then not as a method to study particular works of art or oeuvres, but as a reminder of the physicality of these compositions themselves. The artwork examined in this book speaks of this materiality, and in doing so challenges the so-called immateriality and virtuality that supposedly define our times. In today’s world of financial capitalism, the logic of material presence has been turned on its head, and value resides in the speculative and the abstract. In this inverted schema, banks sell investments, derivatives, stocks and bonds, large corporations sell commodified lifestyles and identities, marketing agencies sell concepts and even ideas are patented. * * * Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial all remind us that artworks are fragments of space, rather than fragments of 1

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time, or at least, even as they are time-images, they are also materially present, palpably co-habiting this world with us. Each of these artists operates in a different medium, and each of them consciously manipulates, modulates and brings into focus the possibilities of this chosen medium. Equally, each of them is self-consciously rooted in historically particular environments (the Dardennes in a post-industrial Belgium, Roy in an India whose secular status is being eroded, Ai in a rapidly modernising China and Burial in a rough, night-time London), and these too are foregrounded in their work. However, despite these obvious differences, taken together they resonate a larger reality and their work allows us to diagnose the symptoms of contemporary society. Any book on art today must begin by recognising that art is now equated with the art market, and artworks are identified with commodities.3 One of the aims of this book is to show that this equivalence is not enough, that there is more to artworks than capital even when they make capital visible.4 The art market has been one of the few sectors that has not only been spared from the 2008 financial crisis, but actually benefited from it. In 2014, Christie’s global sales reached 1.2 billion dollars, a 19 percent increase compared to 2013.5 During the 2015 ten-day spring art auctions in New York, combined sales reached a new record of 2.6 billion dollars (Christie’s alone sold works for a total of 1.72 billion dollars). This growing demand is fuelled by new clients from Asia and the Middle East, as well as increasingly influential private investors that remain unnamed and form part of a global elite.6 It is further accelerated by the need for masterpieces required by new museums preparing to enter new markets, witnessed for instance in the establishment of the Louvre and Guggenheim’s outposts in Abu Dhabi which will be opening their doors in 2016 and 2017, respectively. The financialisation of art has led to a growing disbelief in art itself. While financial capitalism is based on fast-moving transactions, art making and culture in general are based on slow processes. Reducing art to a price tag is an attempt to trivialise it, to integrate it in a system of general equivalence. But artworks are singular, necessary and extraordinary; they have a space of their own, which is not to say that they are autonomous but to reiterate that they occupy the same world as us. In the debate on the autonomy of art, we often confuse autonomy with independence. Those who plead for the autonomy of art without conditions forget that this does not mean that art will be devoid of any kind of dependence on and influence of the larger milieu. At the very least, for artworks to be recognised as such they have be shown, that is, to be exhibited to a public. Even those that are hidden in a closet or in boxes (like Turner’s paintings) only become artworks once they are put on display in a gallery or published in a catalogue.7 But as Bernard Stiegler argues, drawing on etymological filaments, artworks cannot be demonstrated

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but only ‘monstrated’, that is shown or revealed, held up as objects of wonder and awe, omens of things to come.8 Their ‘monstrosity’ or aura exists precisely because we believe in them; without this grain of belief, there would be no art, only a desolate world of generally equivalent objects. Without art, life will be a little less made of excellence and incomprehension.

THE POLITICAL GESTURE The five artists and their respective artworks examined in this book are more or less contemporary, spanning the period from the 1990s to the immediate present (2013–2015). For all five of them, their art comes as a desire to reconstruct the political space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought about by the disenchantment of the 1970s and 1980s: the end of art, postmodernism and the rise of design, marketing and communication. The discrediting of the value of art is a symptom rather than a cause of the disappearance of criteria and the increasing indiscernibility between different forms of art, and not only the merging of high art and popular culture. Every year, we hear about acts of vandalism against contemporary art pieces, particularly during European art fairs or biennales. One of the latest acts of vandalism targeted Anish Kapoor’s piece ‘Dirty Corner’, exhibited in the gardens of the Versailles Palace in summer 2015. This large rusty steel tunnel with obvious sexual connotations was referred to in the French media as the ‘Queen’s vagina’. It was vandalised three times during the few months of its exhibition: the first act consisted of yellow paint splashed onto the cavernous opening of the installation (17 June 2015); the second act covered the structure with anti-Semitic graffiti and calls to save the Christian identity of France (6 September 2015); the third was a bright pink scrawl on the outer wall of the sculpture that read ‘Respect art as u trust God’ (10 September 2015). After the second act, Kapoor had already decided to keep these racial slurs on the structure since to him they now belonged to the artwork itself and acted as an invitation to debate these acts of vandalism in conjunction with the meaning of the sculpture. After a week of debates conducted in the mainstream media, the inscriptions on the artwork were removed under the supervision of Kapoor.9 In light of this particularly conspicuous example, Nathalie Heinich’s sociological examination of contemporary art is interesting. Heinich argues that while transgressions (of sexualities, laws, moralities, institutions, religions) and displacements of the frontiers of acceptability are constitutive of contemporary art, paradoxically, the stratification of the social milieus and the diversification of aesthetic values mean that there are fewer

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and fewer scandals in the world of contemporary art.10 And yet, scandals do have a certain currency in the global art market. All five artists studied in this book ground their artistic practice in a double rejection: first, they stand against the increasingly speculative tendency of art to capitalise on scandals and outrages; second, they oppose all forms of elitism. In doing so, they avoid the two risks inherent in both political criticism and art making: either to be disillusioned by the inability of the arts to change the world and take on a directly political role, or to have a blind faith in the redemptive potentiality of the arts to inform, reform and transform politics.11 They instead produce a space that lies between a total resignation of the emancipating power of the arts (cynicism) and an excessive belief in the immediate political effects of the arts (idealism). Today, the works of Ai Weiwei, Burial, the Dardenne brothers, and Arundhati Roy demand that we ask questions about the physicality of arts in the digital age: Where does art take place when marketing, design and communication constitute our social milieu? Much as these artists are interested in the materiality of their preferred medium, the ways in which it may be modulated, manipulated and stretched to its limits so as to offer a new vision, a sudden idea, an arresting image, at that very breaking point, they are also keenly aware of the virtual networks of cyberspace, which are themselves based on material inscriptions of information and energy. Our argument is that all five of them create in a singular way a political space with their gesture and their artwork: the kind of space that these works make for politics can be characterised as a ‘dorsality’, where the aesthetic and the political are not only imbricated from the very moment of conception, but also supplement each other out of sight.12 As Sorace notes for Ai Weiwei, ‘the political conditions surrounding him . . . are the material of his art’.13 It is from exploring this materiality of politics, presented to us by the Dardenne brothers, Arundhati Roy, Burial and Ai Weiwei, that we intend to delineate ‘the political space of art’; politics is welded with their art, or rather their art reconfigures political materials. When Blanchot referred to the ‘space of literature’, he envisaged a constitutive project in order to reflect on the materiality of language and literature as well as to change the function of literature, its role and its finality. What we want to explore in this book is the original and unique ways in which each of these artists interrogates a number of different issues, while also tracing in their work a shared interrogation of the relationship between politics and art, and the role they must play. Their gesture then is one that carries within it the physical bearing of their art, as well as that to which it gives expression.

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ENCROACHMENTS In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari claim that we need to have a non-philosophical approach to philosophy, in order to prevent it from becoming an autonomous realm—all too secure—but also, and more importantly, to give it a pluralism against the entropic and dogmatic tendency of the specialisation that is happening in all disciplines. In the same way, they refer to non-art as a condition of possibility for all arts to prosper. We want to argue in this book that a non-art approach to art is necessary. Non-art constitutes a position on art and society: the arts are too precious and essential to life to be left solely in the hands of experts and professionals. We could call this approach an attempt to democratise the arts only if this phrasing can be understood neither as simply ‘gaining access to’ artworks, since this is a condition that is necessary but not sufficient, nor as a project to train our eyes and educate our senses. Artworks work when they operate on individuals and communities as such: for a people to come. Claire Bishop addresses the same question of anticipating a different future in thinking about the possibility of museums as anti-hegemonic institutions: ‘Culture becomes a primary means for visualising alternatives; rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons’.14 Art criticism and theory are not excluded from this task either, and Blanchot notes that what characterised French literary criticism in the post-1945 period was its engagement with the materiality of the text itself. In any case, it was not the critic who could explain how a specific work might be read or how it might be decoded from the commanding point of view of a metalanguage. On the contrary, literary critics were to accompany novelists, playwrights, philosophers and poets and write with them the ‘space of literature’, its dorsality. Blanchot admits that the goal of art, and literature in particular, is to produce an object, but this object cannot be put to any use, its existence in itself is sufficient. When Deleuze borrows Paul Klee’s expression ‘the people are missing’, he posits that the task of art is to invent the missing people, but for neither Deleuze nor Klee is this a lament or a form of melancholy but rather a prerequisite for a generative act.15 Equally, neither of them mean that this must be evident in the artist’s or the author’s intention, for art works much more with catastrophes and chaos.16 For Blanchot, writing (sometimes equated in an ambiguous way with art making in general) is the work of silence, a meditation on death, in the absence of gods. It is in her loneliness that the writer can continue to work endlessly, though not for an oeuvre, since this would suggest too much of a power over the intimate yet threatening act of writing. Writing (and art) comes from powerlessness, from absolute withdrawal: ‘As

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long as the world is not yet completely the world, art can probably reserve a place for itself there’.17 Since the world is unworldly, even after Hegel famously proclaimed the end of art in the introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics, art continues to have a social function. Blanchot’s insistence on the reality of the artwork is crucial here. The artist’s occupation is that of poiesis, for she makes a work of art, and because this artwork is a product of labour and has material consistency, it exists in the world and has a role to play in its affairs. But as a consequence, he presciently notes, art has become embedded in the dictates of production and the values of the marketplace.18 Despite this key insight, Blanchot’s poetic meditations on art are not much help in understanding the contemporary state of the discussion on art. The recent work of Boris Groys, on the other hand, allows us to diagnose the symptoms of our neoliberal reality in contemporary art discourse, art making and art criticism. What we borrow from Blanchot, who himself finds it in Mallarme´, is the fundamental idea of the spatiality and the materiality of art, ‘the work of art reduces itself to being’, yet not as a thing, since it is made of language and words that ‘we know, have the power to make things disappear, to make them appear as things that have vanished’.19 But these words and language cannot be mastered as such, rather they materialise the impersonal, or the common, task of literature itself. It is precisely this depersonalised and impersonal conception of literature, and by extension art in general, that we retain from Blanchot. The figure of the amateur then, reinstated by Stiegler as the revolutionary par excellence, is useful in circumventing this drive towards a smoothmoving, market-oriented production line, for the amateur brilliantly displays in her own being the value of non-rationalised work, and indeed the overall importance of non-rationalised forms of work in creating a fuller life.20 Stiegler thickens this notion of the amateur by delving into its original meanings and its historical development.21 Deriving from the Latin amator, the one who loves, the amateur has fallen into disrepute, and instead of being connected with notions of care and curatorship, a refined sensibility and taste, she has come to be seen as the opposite of the professional, as a dilettante, a dabbler. However, this is an exemplar figure for Stiegler, especially in the digital economy, for she can create newness in a super-specialised system. The amateur resonates too with Deleuze and Guattari’s impulse towards non-philosophy and non-art, for these approaches from outside disciplinary traditions will dislodge their fixities and prevent them from ossification. Neither is the notion unrelated to Deleuze’s thoughts on the foreignness of literature and its kinship with delirium, or to the significance of the accidental encounter, the chance discovery for Stiegler, whose slim book of philosophical and autobiographical interviews is marked by his becoming a philosopher

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by accident.22 The amateur then begins to emerge as someone who produces something out of love, but outside of the streamlined system of production and distribution. It is important to hold onto this creation in non-economic terms, and to define it outside the language of financial value, investment potential and accounting, in order to open the imagination to a future-tocome. In other words, at this crucial juncture where the public sphere is under increasing pressure from shrinking state budgets, strengthening profitoriented corporations and debilitating austerity measures, it is imperative that the realm of the political does not become autonomous and left to the experts. Equally, art history and art criticism have become increasingly narrowly defined fields, and the scholarship emerging out of them has become a commodity in the publishing industry. This book is a small attempt to resist our disciplinary borders and to learn to speak outside them.

THE ROAD MAP This book is made up of individual studies concerned with a constellation of themes and speculative questions that we hope will lead us into thinking productively about what a politically engaged art looks like. While each study is organised by artist, we are not interested in providing an exhaustive examination of the artists we are writing about, or persuading our readers to their artistic merit. Rather, this book intends to show the ways in which these artists attempt to bring politics into their work, not only by speaking to the political context within which they are producing their work, but also by creating a space within their work in which a certain kind of politics can be articulated. We therefore read their artworks in order to put them to work. And, though we do not want to forge artificial connections between these artists, we do want to trace in their work a shared interrogation of the relationship between politics and art. Our argument is that all five of them create in a singular way a political space with their gesture and their oeuvre. The tensions and resonances identified in the opening remarks of the introduction will become clearer with the individual studies. But before we turn to these, we attempt to situate the ideas that guide the readings presented in the following chapters in a larger debate, to bring to the surface the influences at work in the book as a whole. In chapter 1, therefore, we outline some of the approaches in art criticism and art theory that have provided fruitful avenues of thought on what is art. This chapter draws on theories of aesthetics and poetics, through a detailed engagement with the work of Rancie`re and Groys, before arguing for a theory of techno-aesthetics. We want to argue that it is in adopting a theory that takes into account the spatial and material

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presence of the artwork along with its technical being that we are able to fully understand the work of the artists examined here. Chapter 2 brings us to the cinema of the Dardenne brothers, which has frequently been studied in terms of a moral and redemptive framework. We aim to reverse this reading by relocating these narratives inside the postindustrial landscape, in order to avoid an analysis centred around the individual and the tendency to universalise the message of the films. By accepting Lefebvre’s definition of space as social fabric, we seek to illustrate how the gestures and human relationships (often centred on struggles) portrayed by the Belgian directors only turn over the entirety of their meaning once the connections to the decaying city are established. The Dardenne brothers are speaking about very specific political situations with specific historical and sociological significance. Focusing on the films Rosetta (1999), The Child (2005) and The Silence of Lorna (2008), we will argue that it is precisely because the main protagonists are spatially relegated to marginal spaces, or what we want to call ‘left-over spaces’, that their lives become precarious, invisible and silenced. Issues of marginality are also central to the work of Arundhati Roy, who is best known for her Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997). However, she has now made the genre of the essay her own, taking on and expanding the role of the essayist in order to write about issues that seem most urgent and immediate. Chapter 3 will focus on some of these essays, as well as her early film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989). The film brings to life the hybrid place occupied by English-speaking, urban Indian students, and her essays put the struggles of those who are most marginalised, most exploited and most demonised by the Indian state centre stage. This movement of her career from an architect, to scriptwriter, to writer, to essayist, is really a continuity of vision, and a confirmation of commitment. We want to show how, for Roy, language and marginality are deeply connected, with the process of marginalisation consisting of not just a lack of access to resources, but also a lack of access to a certain kind of language. The political space that Roy creates is her language itself: the surface of the text and the texture of words are there to make room for politics in art. Her language is an intervention, an interpellation of other things, other problems, other human beings, but also a gathering of stories, experiences and lives. Chapter 4 turns to another figure who has emerged explosively, controversially, on the global art scene in the last few years: Ai Weiwei. As an artist, architect, urban planner, designer and critic, Ai has developed with particular care the relationship between materiality and history. The materials used in his large installations and artworks are usually pre-formed, inscribed with

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meaning from a distant past. Ai politicises Chinese history not by referring to the events but to the artefacts of the time, for example, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in his table series and the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) in his vase series. Wood, clay and porcelain are materials that he returns to time and again in his art; associated with traditional Chinese crafts and craftsmanship, he reuses and reshapes these materials into contemporary art pieces, keeping alive their organic, earthy quality but dislocating them from convention. He use artefacts from older Chinese eras, yet these are often replicas, complicating our relationship to these objects, playing with the real and the fake, true and false identities. In the final chapter, we discuss Burial’s electronic music production. In 2006, with the release of his eponymous album Burial with the label Hyperdub, the London-based artist Burial emerged on the underground electronic scene with his new sound. Some have characterised his music as ‘postdubstep’, at the very same time that the dubstep movement began. Burial has since then released a second LP (Untrue in 2007), then a series of EPs, that continuously push the boundaries of his work by integrating other influences and by constructing new narratives, while continuing to pay homage to the London of the 1990s. Known only by his pseudonym, in an interview, Burial has spoken about his night-time, ghostly, subterranean songs as a ‘descent into another world’.23 His songs have a gritty, messy yet dreamlike quality, and are very consciously rooted in London life, simultaneously expressing a sense of otherness and belonging. These songs are about a certain kind of politics and hold out hope, both at a personal and a social level: ‘Sometimes one tune can mean everything, it’s like a talisman’.24 Burial presents the ontology of UK garage, by outlining the key categories and rules governing this space. The conclusion offers a reminder of the political desires constituted by these artists in their work, desires that are full of an urgency that attempts to edge us closer to the brink of a new world, anticipated with a bodily insistence. This transformation from the cynical world to an expectant world takes unexpected, and sometimes fragile, paths for interpersonal relationships to come (Dardenne brothers), for a youth to come (Arundhati Roy), for a history to come (Ai Weiwei), for music-makers to come (Burial).

NOTES 1. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 56–57.

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2. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 3. Boris Groys, Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press/e-flux journal, 2010), p. 51. 4. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015). 5. Tiffany Jenkins and Sarah Crompton, ‘Is any painting really worth $179m’, The Guardian, 16 May 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/16/is -any-painting-worth-179-million-picasso-auction-world-record (accessed 10 June 2015). 6. Brigitte Dusseau, ‘New York’s spring art auctions have raked in $2.6 billion’, Business Insider, 17 May 2015, http://uk.businessinsider.com/afp-records-tumble-at-new-york -art-auctions-2015-5 (accessed 10 June 2015). 7. Gilles Deleuze presents an evocative reading of Turner’s secreted paintings in ‘La peinture et la question des concepts’, University of Vincennes lectures, 31 March 1981, transcript available: http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article46 (accessed 10 June 2015). On the exhibition of art see Boris Groys, Going Public, p. 46; Boris Groys, ‘Art and Money’, e-flux journal 24, April 2011, p. 1 http://worker01.e-flux.com/ pdf/article_226.pdf (accessed 10 June 2015). 8. Bernard Stiegler, Mystagogies. De l’art contemporain, de la litte´rature et du cine´ma, forthcoming. 9. Oliver Faye and Florence Evin, ‘Enqueˆte a` Versailles apre`s une troisie`me de´gradation de l’oeuvre d’Anish Kapoor’, Le Monde, 11 September 2015; Michel Guerrin, ‘La nause´e et le ‘‘coin sale’’’, Le Monde, 11 September 2015. 10. Nathalie Heinich, Le Triple jeu de l’art contemporain: Sociologie des arts plastiques (Paris: Minuit, 1998). 11. Dork Zabunyan, ‘De l’indistinction en art et de la possibilite´ d’en sortir’, Revue des livres, Vol. 9, January 2009. 12. A resonance is found in the project that is continued by David Wills, in what he calls the realisation of representation. See David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 13. Christian Sorace, ‘China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2014, p. 396. 14. Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art?, with drawings by Dan Perjovschi (London: Koenig Books, 2013), p. 56. 15. ‘We must go on seeking it! We found parts, but not the whole! We still lack the ultimate power, for: the people are not with us. But we seek a people’. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 55. 16. This theme was developed from a phenomenological point of view by Henri Maldiney in Regard, Parole, Espace and then generalised in Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon, Logic of Sensation, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? See also JeanChristophe Goddard, Violence et subjectivite´: Derrida, Deleuze, Maldiney (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 17. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 213, translation modified. 18. ‘Art is real in the work. And the work is real in the world, because it is realised there (in harmony with the world, even in the upheaval and the rupture), for it contributes to the world’s realisation and has no sense, will have no rest except in the world where

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man will be all he can be, man par excellence. But what is the result of this? Within the overall human undertaking, where the tasks conforming to the universal will for production and emancipation are necessarily the most immediately important, art can only follow’. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, pp. 212–13. 19. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 43. 20. For a more focused discussion on the significance of non-rationalised work to an economy of contribution, see Benoıˆt Dillet, ‘Proletarianization, Deproletarianization and the Rise of the Amateur’, boundary 2, vol. 44, no. 1, forthcoming in 2017. 21. Stiegler, Mystagogies. 22. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998); Bernard Stiegler, Philosophising By Accident: Interviews with Elie During, ed. and trans. Benoıˆt Dillet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 23. Burial in Mark Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial: Unedited Transcript’, The Wire, 286, December 2007, http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-tran script (accessed 3 March 2014). 24. Ibid.

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Chapter One

Aesthetics, Poetics and Techno-Aesthetics

That artworks intervene politically is doubtful; when it does happen, most often it is peripheral to the work, if they strive for it, they usually succumb to their own terms. —Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory1

This chapter attempts to outline a few approaches to art in order to demonstrate not only the diversity and the richness of art criticism and philosophy of art but also to present some of the main influences at work in this book. We would like to begin by borrowing Jacques Rancie`re’s useful cartography of art as ‘three major regimes of identification’, that are, but cannot be reduced to, historical periods within history of art.2 These modes of identification are established by distinguishing different ways of linking the production of works of arts to their specific forms of visibility. First, in the ‘ethical regime of arts’, the images are judged according to their truth and their origin, and are conditioned by religion and law. Rancie`re here refers to Plato and his polemics against false images (simulacra), and therefore the ban on poetry and theatre. Indeed, this dichotomy between the real and the copy, the genuine and the artificial, has dominated the practice and theory of art till rather recently, where though the terms of the debate have changed, the frisson of the authentic continues to play itself out in different ways. The second regime is the ‘poetic or representative regime of arts’ that is associated with Aristotle, due to his conceptualisation of the logical structure of narratives as consisting of a beginning, a middle and an end. The work of art in this regime expresses a particular shape, for the artist gives deliberate form to the raw material; this Aristotelian theory is also called ‘hylomorphism’. Rancie`re notes that there is a hierarchy at work in this regime: the action 13

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and the narration prevail over the characters or the descriptions. It is the content and the meaning rather than the form that count. Interestingly, Rancie`re equates this representative regime of arts to the ‘poetic’ regime of arts in order to also include the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European academies of fine arts and their hierarchies of genres. We want to draw attention to Rancie`re’s own understanding of poetics here, since there are other conceptions of poetics that can be mobilised to revitalise art and political criticism today. The major contribution of Rancie`re to art theory is his renewal and displacement of ‘aesthetics’ as the third regime of identification. For him, aesthetics is no longer this science of feeling and taste that comes into play when one is brought face to face with an artwork. It is about the ‘ways of sensible being’ rather than ‘ways of doing’.3 It is also in this regime of art that the logical and causal schemas of the representative regime of art (inherited from Aristotle) are abandoned, for instance in nineteenth-century novels. He diverges here from aesthetics in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, which was too philosophical, for they did not really refer to the great artists of their time in their aesthetic writings.4 For Baumgarten who first used this word in its modern sense in 1750, aesthetica meant the faculty of an inferior knowledge, produced by the contemplation of an artwork and the sensibilities it arouses rather than emerging from the intellect. Aesthetics was then imagined as a discipline of its own in which the domain of sensibility itself becomes an object of knowledge.5 The rationalist foundation of this discipline has little to do with what Rancie`re understands by aesthetics, even though he refers to the work of Friedrich Schiller who was a contemporary of and commentator on Kant and Hegel. While Jimenez is right to insist that ‘we can, without fear of an anachronism, speak of a ‘‘Platonic aesthetic’’’ if we account for Plato’s considerations on the essence of beauty, his definition of mimesis and the role of art in the city-state, Rancie`re himself follows from Deleuze and Lyotard’s aesthetic theories, which are further supplemented by his re-activation of Schiller’s 1794 work, Aesthetic Letters.6 Rancie`re attempts to democratise aesthetic enjoyment by removing the class bias associated with this attitude. Since the realm of the sensible does not match the realm of the intelligible—as Kant explained, the faculty of imagination deregulates the faculty of reason—it is precisely there that the aesthetic experience can announce or even materialise a new distribution of politics. The immanent and democratic order of aesthetics redistributes the roles and hierarchies in place in society. For Rancie`re, aesthetic experience rests on this idea of sharing: he uses the French word partage, often translated as ‘distribution’ in English. The aesthetic experience

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then works at creating the community, and everyone participates in the experience of the sensible.

FROM AESTHETICS TO POETICS We begin our study from the same diagnosis as Rancie`re about the difficult relationship between art and politics, with philosophy as a mediator. While surrealists in the 1930s and situationists in the 1960s demonstrated the possibility of moving from the artistic realm of the avant-garde to a radical critique of politics, such a movement from the aesthetic to the political stopped in the 1970s and the 1980s. Instead, aesthetics became a refuge from the tumult of politics for some critical theorists and philosophers: Deleuze’s books on cinema in the 1980s were first interpreted through this lens, as were some of Lyotard’s works on the sublime in Kant, but it is Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension that is probably the best example of this retreat. For Rancie`re, what art gives to politics is not projects of subordination or emancipation but what it already shares with politics: ‘bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible’.7 Rancie`re does not think that aesthetic experience is a ‘method’ for emancipation; this would be too logical and belong to the Aristotlean representative regime of art. There is no royal road from art to politics, but ‘scenes of dissensus’.8 This dissensus reorganises the sensible: ‘it brings back into play both the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world’.9 It is a moment of rupture, suspension and play that lies potentially in every situation, when the capacities and the incapacities are re-distributed to produce new senses and meanings. In sum, what is crucial for Rancie`re is the already-existing true equality in the aesthetic attitude: ‘it is the employment of the capacity of anyone whatsoever, of the quality of human beings without qualities’.10 These scenes of dissensus can take place anywhere, at any time, and can be produced by anyone. Aesthetics, for him, is the place where new forms of life can and usually do emerge. Rancie`re refers to Foucault’s famous expression the ‘distant roar of battle’, to note that the subjected are never entirely dominated but, as Foucault puts it, beneath the peace, the passions and the cries of battle can still be heard.11 This becomes evident in our own reading of artworks, for instance in the films of the Dardenne brothers discussed in chapter 2, the characters (particularly Rosetta) have to fight the ordered landscape of the city—its geometry of power—to find these moments of rupture and suspension. Rosetta’s character is made of different elements in the film: the mud

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of the forest next to where she lives and the infernal noise of the motorway she has to cross are visual and sonorous coordinates that are composed poetically. There is a poiesis, a gathering of these elements to produce the artwork, that makes up an aiesthesis. We will come back to this distinction. Deleuze’s own reflections on art are inscribed within the perspective opened by Blanchot’s meditations on the impersonality of art, the role of death and solitude, and the origin of art in the human. What is particular to Deleuze’s theory of art is sensation, but a conception of depersonalised sensation; it is as if the work of art records a specific sensation that endures through time, no longer dependent on the artist who has made it, regardless of who is looking, listening, touching, tasting or smelling it.12 Sensation then is primary to art, not the beautiful or the sublime as with post-Kantian aesthetics. Works of art are ‘blocs of sensation’; they have chronicled and preserved the creative catastrophe necessary in any art production. Although Deleuze displaces the aesthetic attitude from the subject to the impersonal, he remains within the aesthetic regime of art as outlined by Rancie`re, since he remains at the level of perception, and perhaps even at the level of judgement.13 Deleuze abhorred judgement, but his conception of ‘percept’, which can be defined as modes of perception or blocs of sensation, retains some traces of judgement, even when these percepts are disembodied and disincarnate. This diffused mode of perception means that judgement can play itself out in a non-hierarchical way. We want to hold on to Rancie`re’s re-elaboration of aesthetics as a regime of visibility and intelligibility beyond the active/passive opposition that is tied up with questions of the spectator and the artist’s positions, but we want to supplement this with Boris Groys’ poetic approach to art. In the introduction to Going Public (2010), ‘Poetics vs. Aesthetics’, Groys explains that he wants to shift the discussion of art criticism away from aesthetics (examining what the artwork looks like and where it comes from) to poetics, by focusing in the first instance on the conditions of existence of the artwork. We want to integrate a certain conception of poetics (or poiesis) into our own approach to provide a way to move past the active/passive polarity so present in traditional art criticism. It is certain that a spectator is not merely passive and enthralled by the creator’s action, that her response to the artwork is active and creative. What Rancie`re however misses, or perhaps dismisses, in Aristotle’s conception of poetics is the distinction between action and production, and the fact that artworks exist under the conditions of poetics. Poetics is concerned with presence or the ‘bringing into being’, that is, how a work of art comes into existence, from non-being to being. As Giorgio Agamben notes, we are accustomed today to think of productive activity (poetics) as practical activity

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(praxis) while the Greeks distinguished between poiesis in the sense of producing and bringing into being, and praxis in the sense of doing and acting.14 Poiesis is then related to what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call the open; it is a ‘bringing forth’ of the effects. Yet, the problem in Aristotle was the emphasis on the producer rather than on the product and the consumer, to use some conventional notions. Another conception of poiesis or poetics therefore takes into account the economic dimension in art, or at least the emphasis on production in the work of art.15 By integrating the diagnoses of the post-Fordist economy, financial capitalism and neoliberalism, we can therefore enlarge our traditional understanding of the artist as a producer, and the spectator as a consumer. New artistic practices and theories have emphasised the changing roles of the artist and the spectator, and we need to think of them as being both producers and consumers in alternate ways. The artist cannot subtract herself from the consumer society which she needs to account for nowadays, since this hyperconsumerist society is her primary material. Rancie`re does not see these new roles that artists have taken over the last thirty years or so. He wants to defend the spectator against all accusations (especially from Bourdieu and other sociologists of art) of being an entirely dominated, unthoughtful and passive consumer, who needs to be taught the rules and norms of art. Rancie`re consequently gives the spectator the glamour that was once stolen from her. Yet, by remaining at the level of aesthetics, Rancie`re forgets the production of the artwork; not that the aesthetic effects of a work can be controlled by the artist or the process of production, but that production itself belongs to art. The aesthetic experience becomes available only through an understanding of the process of creating the artwork, once it is cleared of any intentionality and strict empirical analysis. The main problem with aesthetics is that in a world dominated by digital technology and visual media, everyone is a producer of images, and aesthetics fails to provide an explanation for a large part of the art that directly accounts for this new economy of images. Groys writes polemically that contemporary life is so aestheticised, with the obligation to ‘self-design’, that ‘the aesthetic attitude does not need art, and it functions much better without it’.16 Indeed, Ai Weiwei taps into this zeitgeist when he claims, echoing Duchamp’s ideas about art and artistic practice, that an artist can be an artist even when he produces nothing.17 Today’s post-Fordist mode of production attempts to integrate all forms of aestheticisation of life, yet art does not cease to resist this tendency of total aestheticisation (hence Groys’ proposition). Another formula that follows from Groys is that, ‘in terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand comparison to even an average beautiful sunset’.18 It is not that nature is more real or true than art’s artifice or simula-

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cra; on the contrary, we came to enjoy the average sunset only after our eyes were trained and conditioned by landscape painting. The English term ‘landscape’ itself comes from the seventeenth-century Dutch art terminology. As Maldiney puts it, art (especially abstract art) ‘transposes forms that recount’; these forms ‘recount as gossip all incidents and accidents of the daily world’.19 Far from being in competition with ‘nature’ or ‘reality’, art records the gestures, the movements and the accidents of the world, in order to ‘uproot us through rhythm from the intellectualisation and the mechanisation of the modern man and his universe’.20 This rhythm is itself a poetics, relating or rather registering the daily incidents that arrive to us.

FOR A CRITIQUE OF TECHNO-AESTHETICS When the hypermediatisation of artists is denounced, what is it that we condemn? Is it the stardom, the exuberance, the aristocracy even of the artists? Groys notes that when we talk about the contemporary, we need to begin by acknowledging that all of us live in a milieu filled with images and videos, a media-saturated environment in which all of us participate through our recording and publication of every captured moment. For instance, the practice of taking selfies that has now become a global trend, cutting across gender and class distinctions, changes something in the order of philosophical and artistic discourse and practice. Even politicians like Obama are adepts of selfies that do the work of appealing to a younger generation by making him appear modern and with-it, though of course his most famous selfie, a misstep in keeping with the genre itself, taken with the British and Danish prime ministers at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service was never seen. Artists live in the same world as us, and perhaps by denouncing their hypermediatisation, we also denounce our very own media exposure. Rancie`re finds Benjamin’s thesis on the mechanical reproduction of artworks ‘questionable’, and wants to invert the terms, arguing that ‘for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they first need to be recognised as arts’.21 He goes so far as to conclude that Not only did the aesthetic regime begin well before the arts of mechanical reproduction, but it is actually this regime that made them possible by its new way of thinking art and its subject matter.22

To even conceive of aesthetics outside of technical production and reproduction is an unsustainable and idealist position. If the aesthetic regime, as Ran-

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cie`re so brilliantly argues, is this new regime that flattens hierarchies and builds a community of equals (‘anonymous individuals’), then there is a new configuration of the audience as well. The aesthetic regime, that began in the early nineteenth century as Rancie`re would have it, was made possible by social and technical inventions. First these anonymous subjects needed to be literate and have at least a basic education before they could read Romantic or Victorian novels (even in their serialised forms), and second, the printing press and the publishing organs had to exist so as to disseminate the words and the pages to these anonymous subjects. George Eliot did not invent the printing press! Art, and particularly contemporary art, is part of the social and technical milieu, it cannot uproot itself from its logistics. However, it can carve inside itself its own space, like the empty though conscribed spaces within the large installations by Ai Weiwei (Fragments, 2005), but also the loosened spaces and secluded recesses in films or books. What contemporary artists attest is the shift in the early twenty-first century from mass art consumption to mass art production. The artworks studied in this book also respond in singular ways to this extraordinary change in art, culture and politics. YouTube was only created ten years ago in February 2005, Facebook was invented in 2004 at Harvard University but officially opened its services to the general public in 2006, Flickr was launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Instagram went live in October 2010. With these new social media platforms, older services such as MySpace (created in August 2003) and Second Life (also opened in 2003) were replaced by the current powerful actors of the Internet: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (also known as ‘GAFA’). These micro-blogging and online broadcasting services have allowed everyone to upload images, videos, texts and music. Numbers are far from meaningful in themselves, but they give consistency to Groys’ argument about mass art production. According to official figures, there are five hundred million tweets sent everyday on Twitter,23 three hundred hours of videos uploaded every minute on YouTube,24 3.5 million images uploaded daily on Flickr in 2013,25, and eighty million photos uploaded daily on Instagram in 2015.26 There are ten billion pictures on Flickr, forty billion on Instagram, and 250 billion on Facebook.27 These figures are already outdated, much like the project of printing volumes of Wikipedia was outdated even before the ink had dried on the paper at the press, given the constant enrichment of the Wikipedia pages by users and robots. Yet, these figures give us a sense of the immanentisation, or flattening, of words and images that has happened in the last ten years. In the face of this immanentisation, artists can respond in at least two ways. The first would consist in making this reality appear as it is, as if

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individuals could not see or face this new regime of images. The second is to produce what Groys has called ‘weak images’ that could resist catastrophes and changes; this is an ‘art of low visibility’.28 This does not mean that works of art should be ephemeral or absent from the public sphere; on the contrary, it is a conscious break with the immediate circulation of information (images and videos as data) that short circuits many existing networks. This is the path taken by the artists discussed in this book, all of whom display a fragility and naivety that is constitutive of their art: the slow and untimely cinema of the Dardenne brothers, the forgotten and outdated materials used by Ai Weiwei, the retreat of Burial from the celebrity culture and live performances of electronic dance music, the measured and carefully crafted militant words of Arundhati Roy. Each of them faces the general equivalence of images, that is paradoxically praised by Rancie`re when he refers to equality in the aesthetic experience, that reconfigures the space of art, re-enacting the end of art. This is why we argue here for a synthesis of poetics and aesthetics. Aesthetics without poetics is disoriented since it fails to account for the technical process functioning in and around the artwork, but equally, poetics without aesthetics is blind, ignoring the life of the visible. Joseph Beuys’ famous maxim ‘everyone is an artist’ becomes realised today with the possibility to produce, at very low cost, audio, visual or video artworks and broadcast them on the Internet. For Groys, what was proclaimed by Beuys in the 1960s and 1970s as a right has now become an obligation: now, everyone has to be an artist and ‘self-design’.29 Given the aestheticisation of everyday life, even conscious ethical or aesthetic choices have become subsumed by neoliberal capitalism as commodified lifestyles that can be branded and packaged, ready to be consumed. We are our own PR machines: Self-design is a practice that unites artist and audience alike in the most radical way: though not everyone produces artworks, everyone is an artwork. At the same time, everyone is expected to be his or her own author.30

This is particularly true for the digital generation, for young people who spend hours making aesthetic and poetic choices about their Facebook profile pictures, selecting the angles for their selfies, scrutinising and judging the clothes that their friends wear and display. This new regime of images reorganises the distribution of the sensible in ways that Rancie` re had not expected. Individuals have to make daily aesthetic and poetic choices if they accept entry into capitalist society. It is not only because of its financialisation that art has become central to contemporary Western societies (and the non-Western societies that integrate some of their elements), but because aesthetics is now the ‘first philosophy’, it has dethroned Levinas’ ‘ethics as first philosophy’, as Ve´ronique Bergen implies,

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The selfie is the anti-Face of Levinas. By renouncing the meeting with alterity, it participates in the virtual post-ego plugin, that is pixelised by the simulacra of the Other and events.31

The contemporary figure is not the alienated brainless consumer but the tourist or the nomad. Even in one’s immobility, the constant sharing of texts, images and videos on the Internet offers another way to travel and change one’s landscape. As Groys notes, it is often argued that the constant mobility of contemporary artists partly explains their depoliticisation.32 It is by integrating the role of technics in aesthetics that Groys can develop his analysis from the position of the producer. He outlines certain axiomatic statements that give sense to the practice of contemporary artists. Of course, one does not need to believe in these statements, or take them at face value, for they have a performative effect that goes beyond mere analysis or discourse on the history of art; they attempt to participate in the making of art itself.33 Consider this bold dictum: ‘Popular art is made for a population consisting of spectators. Avant-garde art is made for a population consisting of artists’.34 At first, this appears as a very useful definition of the avant-garde that helps to establish a domain for it. However, Groys’ objective is less to write a treatise that could be followed than to carve out or to delineate once again a space for artists today. ‘[T]he avant-garde opens a way for an average person to understand himself or herself as an artist’.35 It is avant-garde artists (Malevich, for instance) who produce a grammar of art that may be used by every artist, presenting not the rules of art but the way art is made. In a brilliant article, Groys explains the misunderstandings that surrounded the reception of Clement Greenberg’s work on the avant-garde and the kitsch.36 He problematises the foremost charge made against contemporary art in the last thirty years: it is often criticised for being elitist. Yet, he answers this criticism by reflecting on what we assume ‘elite’ to mean when we charge art with being elitist. Since the global elite has really become wealthy by selling products with a mass appeal, it always attempts to conceal its real power and the inequalities it rests on and perpetuates. It is strange to think of artists as being the global elite, but what is perhaps meant by ‘elitism’ in this charge is that avant-garde or conceptual art does not have a mass appeal, in fact it does not play out at the level of taste at all, but at the level of knowledge and mastery. This is where Groys accepts Greenberg’s analysis of the avant-garde: ‘the avant-garde in this sense operates mainly by way of abstraction—removing the ‘‘what’’ of the artwork to reveal its ‘‘how’’ . . . [it] wants to demonstrate how art is made’.37 Therefore by following Groys’ argument that everyone nowadays is an artist or at least everyone self-aestheticises, avant-garde works reveal themselves not as elitist, but rather speaking to

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the producer side of the individual and not the consumer side, ‘plac[ing] professional art outside the problem of taste, and even outside the aesthetic attitude as such’.38 All these different steps taken by Groys to build his argument in this article are significant for understanding his rejection of aesthetics. To him, contemporary art is situated beyond the beautiful and the ugly, beyond taste and displeasure, because spectators have become emancipated, not in Rancie`re’s sense, but quite the opposite, they are no longer spectators but art producers: contemporary art is a spectacle without spectators. It is a community of equals since everyone has access and engages in the making, remaking, sampling or remixing of different materials and sources.39 In fact, Groys’ writing is also intended for artists themselves, in order to challenge their use of material in a milieu filled with images, videos and technological devices: However, even if today’s wider populations produce artworks, they do not investigate, analyze, and demonstrate the technical means by which they produce them— let alone the economic, social, and political conditions under which images are produced and distributed. Professional art, on the other hand, does precisely that—it creates spaces in which a critical investigation of contemporary mass image production can be effectuated and manifested. This is why such a critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being. And this support should be discussed and offered beyond any notion of taste and aesthetic consideration. What is at stake is not an aesthetic, but a technical, or, if you like, poetic, dimension of art.40

What Groys criticises in the aesthetic approach is the forgetting of materiality and spatiality, as if artists were working with ‘concepts’, ideas and sensations in a vacuum. The new technical means of producing and distributing music, images and videos has even accelerated this blindness. Now that everyone has access to quasi-professional photographic, video or music recording equipment, we are told that what distinguishes professional filmmakers, music artists and photographers are the ideas and not the specific reworking of the material in a specific context. The access to large databases of images changes the associated milieu and the place of artist productions.41 To understand the poetic gestures of art producers, Groys engages in a dialogue with Walter Benjamin, anticipating techno-aesthetic analyses from Simondonians. Although Benjamin’s own reflections on the technical reproducibility of artworks has been used excessively (it has been devastated, to speak in ecological terms), Groys expands on Benjamin’s theory with his own interests in digital (re)production and his project to revitalise art’s power today in the face of its discredit brought on by its financialisation:

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[I]mages are constantly transformed, rewritten, reedited, and reprogrammed as they circulate through these networks—and with each step they are visually altered. . . . We are unable to stabilise a copy as a copy, as we are unable to stabilise an original as an original. There are no eternal copies as there are no eternal originals. Reproduction is as much infected by originality as originality is infected by reproduction. In circulating through various contexts, a copy becomes a series of different originals. . . . In this sense, a copy is never really a copy; rather, a new original in a new context. Every copy is by itself a flaˆneur . . . it loses all auras and gains new auras.42

Groys, the master of suspicion, forgery and provocation, turns Benjamin on his head: art should begin from Benjamin’s aporia about the economy of images, originals and copies, and how to produce new auras, how to aura-ize art again. Groys’ own philosophical groundwork in On the New (1992) and Under Suspicion (2000) was to think through the production of the new in the postmodern age, that is, in an age of repetition and pastiche.43 Groys’ tenacious questions are: How do we make art today? How can we make art today given our technical milieu? The answer, however tentative and speculative, has something to do with a kind of nomadism that puts pressure on traditional notions of fixity and authority, a kind of desire that proceeds from fullness and is not threatened by lack, and a kind of art that reconstitutes the spaces it traverses. In an unfinished letter to Derrida dated around 1982, Gilbert Simondon writes that techno-aesthetics comes before aesthetics as a discourse and a sensibility. Much like Rancie`re, from a different angle, Simondon argues that art is active rather than acquiescent, aesthetics is not only a passive sensation or quiet contemplation by the consumer, but it demands a productive and active posture. Simondon starts his reflections on techno-aesthetics from the technical object rather than from the artwork: ‘No object is indifferent to our aesthetic need. It is perhaps not true that every aesthetic object has a technical value, but every technical object has, from a certain perspective, an aesthetic tenor’.44 Simondon’s passion for technical objects allows him to find a certain aesthetic joy in working with technical objects of all sorts (water towers, a car engine, for instance), and his own writing about those objects gives them a poetic texture. He wrote elsewhere about the need to save the technical object from its current alienation and called for an aestheticisation and even an eroticisation of the technical object.45 But these brief remarks in his 1982 letter to Derrida are more in the manner of a hypothesis that opened a new, fertile field of inquiry than solid propositions that can stand up in the immense corpus on aesthetics and the history of art. It is in On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects that Simondon is more systematic on his aesthetic thought, as Yves Michaud suggests.46 The technical object is not beautiful in itself but it is its inscription in a singular place that gives the object

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its aesthetic quality. Simondon refers to an ‘encounter’ of the technical object with a context. Techno-aesthetics is therefore this distance between a pure aestheticism that forgets the technical and poetic aspect of objects and works of art, and the anti-aestheticism of a technical functionalism that is absolutely reluctant to take into account its aesthetic qualities. From a techno-aesthetic perspective, Stiegler argues that the first industrial revolution had tremendous effects on sensibility and culture, allowing faster cycles of evolution and the industrialisation of culture through new ways of capturing and recording. He called the effect of industrial revolutions on aesthetics the ‘machinic turn of sensibility’.47 But in this process of coevolution, the evolution that aesthetic sensibility and the increasing technicity of life was overshadowed both in artistic practices and artistic criticism. Ludovic Duhem who works at developing a systematic theory of technoaesthetics notes that Kant, Hegel and Heidegger operated a ‘denial of technics’ in their aesthetic writings.48 This denial is not an ignorance but a ‘systematic refusal’ to take into account the role of technics in art; Duhem calls it an ‘obsessive fear’ or ‘haunting fear’ (hantise in French), borrowing from the psychoanalytic vocabulary. Aesthetics wants to dissociate itself from its technicity, considering it to be simply a means to an end rather than its essence. Although there is an increasing recognition of technology in artworks and exhibition—what is sometimes referred to as the posthuman turn in art or the technological turn in art—Duhem argues powerfully that For validity’s sake, techno-aesthetics should consequently overcome today’s technological turn to show that art, no matter which historical periods and types of practice we consider, carries in itself a technical charge that one needs to account for so as to have a complete understanding of its reality.49

From this hypothesis, it should not be an anachronism to study Ancient Greek art from a techno-aesthetic point of view by taking into account both Plato’s aesthetics and archaeological studies of objects, be they artistic or nonartistic. The objective of techno-aesthetics is therefore not to be too close to objects or to abolish aesthetics altogether by reducing the artworks to physical and mechanical properties, but to also stay away from the temptation of subjective contemplation.50 Its ambition is to diagnose the genesis of both the object and the subject in the process of artistic production. The problem with the recent technological turn in art is the lack of critical distance. With its fascination for new technical objects, some of the protagonists risk emptying out politics and critique from art, instead of questioning the role of these new objects in everyday life as being both enabling and disabling.

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NOTES 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 242. 2. Jacques Rancie`re, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum 2004), pp. 20–23. In many ways, this cartography of regimes is reminiscent of Foucault’s historicisation of ‘epistemes’ in The Order of Things. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). 3. Jacques Rancie`re, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), p. 11. 4. Marc Jimenez, Qu’est-ce que l’esthe´tique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 12. 5. Jimenez, Qu’est-ce que l’esthe´tique? pp. 20–25. 6. Ibid., p. 22. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). ‘I read again Kant through Schiller, after stumbling across the Aesthetic Letters on a bookstall’. Jacques Rancie`re, La me´thode de l’e´galite´ : Entretien avec Laurent Jean-Pierre et Dork Zabunyan (Paris: Bayard, 2012), p. 127. 7. Rancie`re, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 19. 8. Jacques Rancie`re, The Emancipated Spectator, Kraus Gregory Elliott (London: Vero, 2011), p. 49. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Jacques Rancie`re, ‘Thinking between disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge’, Parrhesia, 1, 2006, p. 9. ‘If we look beneath peace, order, wealth, and authority, beneath the calm order of subordinations, beneath the State and State apparatuses, beneath the laws, and so on, will we hear and discover a sort of primitive and permanent war?’ Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at Colle`ge de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 46–47, emphasis added. On the same page, Foucault refers to the affective state of war, for example, ‘the noise and confusion of war, in the mud of battles’, etc. 12. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 163. Even though the artwork preserves this captured gesture seemingly into infinity, in actuality ‘it lasts no longer than its support and materials—stone, canvas, chemical colour, and so on’. 13. Rancie`re defines succinctly the aesthetic attitude in Kant as ‘judgement without concepts’. See Rancie`re, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 43. 14. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Poiesis and Praxis’, in The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 68. He also adds to this schema work as a pure physical activity, as the third type of human doing, independent from poiesis and praxis. 15. Paul Vale´ry also argues in his inaugural Colle`ge de France lecture in 1937 that the poetic approach needs to take into account the roles of producers and consumers of value by using words from political economy. Paul Vale´ry, ‘Premie`re lec¸on du cours de poe´tique’, Varie´te´ V (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), pp. 295–322. 16. Boris Groys, Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), p. 12. 17. In an interview, Ai speaks about his time in New York: ‘I tried to survive by doing

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any kind of work that came to hand . . . I wasn’t making so much art. After Duchamp, I realised that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product’. Ai Weiwei Speaks: With Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 86–87. 18. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 19. Maldiney, Regard, Parole, Espace, p. 19. 20. Ibid., p. 20. 21. Rancie`re, The Politics of Aesthetics, pp. 31–32. 22. Ibid., p. 32. 23. Twitter, https://about.twitter.com/company (accessed 2 July 2015). 24. Joan E. Solsman, ‘Youtube’s Music Key: Can paid streaming finally hook the masses?’ CNET, 12 November 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-music-key -googles-stab-at-taking-paid-streaming-songs-mainstream/ (accessed 2 July 2015). 25. Adrianne Jeffries, ‘The man behind Flickr on making the service ‘‘awesome again’’’, The Verge, 20 March 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/20/4121574/flickr -chief-markus-spiering-talks-photos-and-marissa-mayer (accessed 2 July 2015). 26. Instagram, ‘Stats’, https://instagram.com/press/ (accessed 2 July 2015). 27. Adi Robertson, ‘Facebook users have uploaded a quarter-trillion photos since the site’s launch’, The Verge, 17 September 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/17/474 1332/facebook-users-have-uploaded-a-quarter-trillion-photos-since-launch (accessed 2 July 2015). 28. Groys, Going Public, p. 119. We, however, disagree with Groys’ association of weak images with unpopularity. 29. Ibid., p. 36. Hal Foster calls it ‘total design’, see Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 13–26. ‘Contemporary design is part of a greater revenge of capitalism on postmodernism’ (p. 25). 30. Groys, Going Public, p. 41. 31. Ve´ronique Bergen, ‘Apre`s les selfies, les dronies, de´chets visuels de petites tranches de vie formate´e’, Focus Vif, 27 July 2015, http://focus.levif.be/culture/livres-bd/nouvelles -mythologies-apres-les-selfies-les-dronies-dechets-visuels-de-petites-tranches-de-vie-for matee/article-column-406459.html (accessed 30 July 2015). 32. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 106. 33. ‘I must confess . . . a wish to contribute to a certain balance of power in today’s art work—namely, to find more space in it for art functioning as political propaganda’. Gross, Art Power, p. 4. 34. Groys, Going Public, p. 115. 35. Ibid. 36. Boris Groys, ‘Art and Money’, e-flux journal 24, April 2011, pp. 1–9. 37. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 38. Ibid., p. 4. 39. ‘Making’, or do-it-yourself, has become a watchword in both art-and-craft subcultures and in the business world. See Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business Publishing, 2012), on the ideological ‘promises’ of capitalism; for a sociological study of the hackerspace Noisebridge in San Francisco, see Michel Lallement, L’Aˆge du faire: hacking, travail, anarchie (Paris: Le Seuil, 2015). 40. Groys, ‘Art and Money’, p. 7, emphasis added.

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41. The immanentisation of words and images that was described before with Instagram and Facebook is furthered by the project of the Internet Archive Book Images (led by Georgetown University and Yahoo). With the digitising of books from libraries around the world focused on text-searchable databases, using optical character recognition programmes, images were left buried in old books. The team working on this project have uploaded more than five million copyright-free images dating from the sixteenth century to 1923. Leo Kelion, ‘Millions of historical images posted to Flickr’, BBC News, 29 August 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28976849 (accessed 21 December 2014). See, the page of the Internet Archive Book Images on Flickr: https://www.flickr .com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/. 42. Groys, Going Public, pp. 66–67. 43. Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media, trans. Carsten Strathausen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Boris Groys, On the New, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2014). 44. Gilbert Simondon, ‘On Techno-Aesthetics’ (translated by Arne de Boever), Parrhesia, 14, 2012, p. 3, http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia14/parrhesia14_simondon .pdf (accessed on 3 September 2015). 45. Gilbert Simondon, ‘Sauver l’objet technique’, Esprit, 76, 1983, p. 147. 46. Yves Michaud, ‘The Aesthetics of Gilbert Simondon: Anticipation of the Contemporary Aesthetic Experience’, in A. de Boever, A. Murray, J. Roffe and A. Woodward (eds.), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 121–33. 47. Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Vol. 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), pp. 9–10. 48. See Ludovic Duhem, ‘Introduction a` la techno-esthe´tique’, Arche´e, February 2010, http://www.archee.qc.ca/ar.php?pagearticle&no343, and Ludovic Duhem, ‘Vers une techno-esthe´tique’, Arche´e, February 2010, http://www.archee.qc.ca/ar.php?pagear ticle&no344 (accessed 7 July 2015). 49. Duhem, ‘Introduction a` la techno-esthe´tique’. 50. Ibid., Duhem refers to an ‘average distance’.

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Left-over Spaces The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers

Resisting until the last energy for the destiny of the work of art, against the deaf power that tightens, blocks, walls in, stifles, embalms. This struggle with this destiny endorses the genuine work of art. —Luc Dardenne, Au dos de nos images1 Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future. —Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a Creative Act?’2

BROKEN CITIES A jolting handheld camera closely follows its subject, propelled by her body’s motion, its tension. Jagged breathing, heavy footfalls crowd into the already claustrophobic shot, where the viewer is brought into an uncomfortable, almost unbearable proximity with the character. There is a finely held balance between a strained stillness and uncontrollable movement: the characters often swing between invisibility and speechlessness, on the one hand, and thrashing about, kicking, rolling, screaming inarticulately, on the other. The style is deceptively simple, almost austere, and yet there is an attentive29

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ness to the framing—the shots are carefully composed, characters positioned against the frames made by the lines of walls and corners, beams, windows, doors. Distilled narratives present characters that seem simultaneously vulnerable and inscrutable, characters who offer up their drives and desires slowly, slipped in through casual gestures and quiet dialogues with their surroundings. Precarious, recalcitrant figures, they are filmed against the ruins of cities drained of a future. And yet we know these are not films of dystopias and nihilism, but diagnoses of a society too rationalised, too mechanised for human emotion. The protagonists have to learn to deal with the problem of enunciation in a world that attempts to silence them. So, Rosetta must name herself, and Sandra must repeat her predicament again and again, in order to find a way into reality, by learning how to use their voice.3 This is a world of ordinary injustice, economic insecurity and a cruel lack of opportunity, where somehow the protagonists still manage to steal back some humanity, a sliver of hope—incomplete, perhaps illusory, but there. * * * Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been key figures on the Francophone cinematic landscape for the last two decades, but especially since the release of Rosetta, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999. All their subsequent films have had triumphant screenings at Cannes, and in 2005 with The Child, they won their second Palme d’Or. Their work has already been the focus of a few studies, and they have given numerous interviews where they speak of the process of filmmaking, their choice of actors, the attention they pay to location and the thought that goes into every detail of their films.4 The diary of Luc Dardenne, On the Back of Our Images, 1991–2005 (Au dos de nos images, 1991–2005), written over a period of fifteen years and documenting their working method, was published in 2005. They are now in their sixties and have collaborated on all their films, moving from documentaries centred around steelworkers in their home city of Seraing earlier in their career, to the fiction films that they see as their true me´tier.5 Releasing a film every three years, they are well known for The Promise (La Promesse, 1996), Rosetta (1999), The Son (Le Fils, 2002), The Child (L’Enfant, 2005), The Silence of Lorna (Le Silence de Lorna, 2008), The Kid with a Bike (Le Gamin au Ve´lo, 2011) and Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, 2014). Their next project The Unknown Girl (La Fille Inconnue), currently being filmed, is scheduled for release in 2016, breaking the three-year cycle. Part of the reason that we were drawn to their cinema is because of the coherence that is evident through all seven films; they frequently assert that they collaborate on every aspect of the film, the scriptwriting, the directing, the producing, the casting, the choice of costumes and locations, micromanaging the smallest detail. There is then a certain logic

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that runs through the films, manifesting itself even as each film shows a cinematic evolution and maturation. It is precisely this implicit rationale that has led to the criticism that they have made the same film seven times. But we see this criticism more as an appraisal of their work; the fact that each film resonates so deeply with the others—that all of them address a similar cluster of themes—is what allows the possibility of something larger than each of the films taken separately. This repetition is actually an expanding resonance, a practiced style that creates the oeuvre of the Dardennes. The object of our study is the presence and the operation of space in the films of the Dardenne brothers. In this chapter, we will examine three films—Rosetta, The Child and The Silence of Lorna—and present the argument that they depict an original account of the contemporary European city as a totality (in this case an eastern Belgian steeltown). The construction of the characters, their relationships and the moral implications of their actions are usually the most discussed aspects of the Dardennes’ cinema. Instead, we want to shift focus to the city, because without the city—the urban landscape, the buildings and the concrete, visceral materiality that the viewer can almost

Figure 2.1 Steelscape along the Meuse, 2006. Photo by LHOON / Creative Commons 2.0.

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touch,6 taste and smell—the protagonists would not possess the same depth and magnetism. In making our argument, we also draw on Luc Dardenne’s diary, not only because it offers us glimpses of the Dardennes’ directorial process, but because it is a work that attempts to theorise that process in ways that offer important insights into their cinematic language, and disclose how the aesthetic and the political are imbricated in their work from the very beginning. As such then, the book deserves to be looked at as part of the Dardennes’ cinematic oeuvre. The setting is not a mere detail, a backdrop for the action; rather, there is a real sense of the place in this cinema. All seven films that that we have mentioned take place either in the Walloon city Lie` ge, or in the postindustrial town, Seraing, situated five kilometres away from Lie`ge. As Sarah Cooper observes: Set principally in or around Seraing, an industrial region in decline just outside of Lie`ge, their gritty fictions probe the harsh realities of immigration, unemployment, and existence on the margins of Belgian society. The setting of the films is important, since the river Meuse, the woods, the roadways, and no-man’s land of the surrounding area lend a brute materiality to the socio-historical positioning of the characters.7

It is evident that the directors do not treat the city as a fixed, historically accurate mise en sce`ne but as a living, almost viscous medium as they attempt ‘to interpret their subjects’ lives in this desolate environment’.8 The space is not just there, it is not a given; it is created, invented, reworked, altered and repeatedly thought through so as to determine in what sense the characters express a being-in-the-world. The only access the audience has to history and time is through the optics of the place.9 Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the Dardennes’ cinema is how they manage to capture a precise sense of place and time without a direct reference. The buildings, the landscape or the city are never directly the object of conversation, but they function as a milieu, as a platform onto which the characters emerge. Yet the Dardenne universe, and the unfolding of its story, could not take place without the uncompromisingly gritty details that they depict, as if they were postindustrial impressionists, replacing the lotuses with the rusty factories. The bleakness of these grey, concrete, post-industrial spaces is further emphasised by the minimal, mild, winter light in which the directors like to film.10 We aim to chart the leaden landscape of these films by tracing the movements of the protagonists in two particular kinds of spaces: the woods that lie next to motorways in Rosetta and The Silence of Lorna, and the motorways that feature prominently in The Child. Even though these spaces are the leftover spaces of the city, cut out and discarded from the inner spaces, they are

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still heavily inscribed and symbolic sites. Not only do they move the plot forward and are expressive of the characters that inhabit them, they also engage in a sustained, though understated, political critique. In his essay on Habermas and Pleasantville (1998), Robert Porter asks why it is important to argue for a notion of cinema as political critique. He answers this by firmly stating: [I]t is important that ‘we’ political theorists be constantly reminded of the often particularistic and, at times, rather rarified, abstract, even myopic, discourses that we engage in, and that political concepts can find a more expansive, visually stimulating or arresting form through their expression in a popular-cultural form like film. At the same time, of course, recognition of the capacity and autonomy of cinema to engage in political thought and critique immediately demands of the political theorist a specific kind of cultural-media literacy, where ‘cultural-media literacy’ signifies a developing awareness of the concrete operations of political concepts as they are mapped out at the level of the cinematic text.11

In this analysis of the spaces of the woods and the motorways is present a recognisable engagement with a very particular kind of cityscape that is riddled by interstices, left-over after the rest has been used up and consumed. The characters of these films live their lives in these scrapped spaces, and this is where the unforgiving edge of the political critique of these films becomes evident. The entire cinematic oeuvre of the Dardenne brothers reveals a coherent critique of contemporary society, of the hard and shiny surface formed by its consumerist practices and its middle-class mores which will always remain inaccessible to their protagonists, who live, work, cheat and survive in the subterranean world below that surface.12 The marginal spaces that the protagonists inhabit (the work camp in The Promise, the trailer in Rosetta, the motorway shack in The Child) are on the outside territorially and economically, yet it is the Dardennes’ cinematic project to bring them to the fore of the spectatorial space. Although their stories are poignant and gripping, and the storytelling technique ingenious, Luc Dardenne repeatedly writes in his diary that they do not want to tell stories, but to explore ideas, behaviours or instincts that are more primal and complex. For instance, in the case of Rosetta, their aim was ‘to describe the behaviour of someone whose entire being is occupied by the obsession to exist normally, to belong to society, not to be pushed outside, not disappear . . . a vagabond who would kill to leave her condition. No humour. Only angst’.13 Not just Rosetta, but all their films avoid a psychological development of the story; they portray from the inside, the gestures, the things, the environment embodying and inhabiting the characters. It is a materialist cinema that refuses to fictionalise and dramatise the plot but, at

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Figure 2.2 Industries around Seraing, 2006. Photo by LHOON / Creative Commons 2.0.

the same time, creates an ensemble with the protagonist and an object locked together: the boots in Rosetta, the belt and the measuring tape in The Son, the pram in The Child. Luc Dardenne writes, ‘since cinema is really to film utterly concrete stuff . . . cinema is interested in the accessory. The essential aspect of cinema is the accessory’.14 Anyone who has seen their films will attest that their stories are powerful, intense and extraordinary, but it is as if the story mediates what really counts for these filmmakers: the accessories, the crumpled corners of the city, the riverbank or the left-over strips of forest neighbouring the motorway. The accessories pierce the screen to lodge themselves in reality; the left-over spaces recall the ‘extraordinary’ (the invisible, yet ordinary) life of the Dardennian characters: Roger, Igor, Riquet, Rosetta, Olivier, Francis, Steve, Bruno, Sonia, Claudy, Lorna. If their films have been interpreted from a moral or ethical standpoint,15 it is precisely because of the vacuity and emptiness of the post-industrial city. If the viewer constantly asks, ‘What is going to happen next?’, ‘How is s/he going to escape, survive, succeed, or fail?’, it is precisely because of the effects of the ruins of the post-industrial landscape: the ruin of a stable moral-

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ity that has been supplanted by the cynicism that represents a world without meaning. However, these films are far from cynical and each of the characters fights with the place to which he or she has been marginalised, striving against this pessimism to find meaning in their actions. Following a reading of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents, Luc Dardenne writes in 1993 how he envisioned the role of the cinematographer in Europe as attempting ‘to help the human being to find a way in the labyrinth of her/his destructive drives of life’.16 To be more precise, these protagonists—illegal immigrants, small-time criminals, teenage parents, junkies, trailer-park inhabitants—are depicted through a lens that makes them subjects in their own right, not objects of our pity. There is a compassion in the portrayal of these characters, and an absence of any attempt at sentimentality. Part of the way in which the filmmakers avoid this sentimentality is through the movement of the camera and the positioning of the gaze of the viewer. The protagonists are often filmed from the back, and from odd angles that cut a part of their face or their actions out of the frame. In Rosetta, for instance, the handheld camera doggedly moves along with the heroine, following her closely, mimicking the anger and aggression of her movement. It is through these intense close-ups of the nape of her neck, her eyes, her clenched fists, her gestures, that we empathise with her overwhelming frustration and rage. It is indeed part of the Dardennes’ cinematography to focus on the gesture rather than facial expression, on silence and observation rather than sound and dialogue. Luc Dardenne speaks of how it is more interesting to focus on the characters’ bodies and gestures because ‘filming gestures and very specific, material things is what allows the viewer to sense everything that is spiritual, unseen, and not a part of materiality’.17 They explain that they film from the back because ‘then when you see the face, you really look at it’.18 It is hardly accidental that Luc Dardenne’s book is titled On the Back of Our Images, for while ‘on the back of’ suggests that which happens as a result of something or on the strength of something, it also draws on their cinematic grammar where the backs of characters are given screen time along with their faces, a move that shows their interest in the underside of things, in that which happens out of sight. This attentiveness to the back also brings a kind of visceral quality to their films, evoked by the visible torsion of muscles, the suggestion of tenderness and vulnerability of the exposed neck. It is this that gives a humanity to these marginalised characters, without providing elaborate psychological explanations. Central to the way these characters are fleshed out is the manner in which they inhabit the city. The spaces that they occupy reflect their marginalised position in society, but they also have an expressivity and autonomy that goes beyond this. All of these films are in some ways about the difficulty of speak-

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ing. The spaces that the protagonists occupy and the gestures that they enact then articulate this problem, while also articulating a deeper psychological and emotional state. There is a clear continuum between the character, the gesture and the space. The socially marginalised protagonist occupies spaces that lie on the margins of the city, on the borders of what are seen as productive and legitimate urban spaces. Existing in the realm of the unseen and the unheard, it is only the gesture that can reveal deeper truths.19 The gesture comes into focus through the extended silence of the films, emphasised by the minimal, pared down dialogue, as well as the complete absence of any background music; there is no background score in the films, and the sounds of the city and its traffic are predominant.

WOODS The eponymous heroine of Rosetta lives in a trailer park whose address is provided by the roundabout next to it, ironically called ‘Grand Canyon’. On the way back from the city, Rosetta makes her way to the trailer park by crossing a busy motorway, walking through a patch of woodland and then entering the property through an opening in the wire fencing that surrounds it. Her walk home is marked by rituals that are repeated several times in the film. She gets off the bus, hides behind a gate until the bus pulls away, then dodges through the fast-moving cars to enter the safety and solitude of the woods. Here she finds the boots that she has hidden in a drain, exchanging them for her city shoes. She then cautiously enters through a break in the fence and goes to the muddy pond where she has hidden the line and hook with which she tries to catch trout, keeping watch for the janitor, before she heads for the trailer that she shares with her alcoholic mother. The woods function as an odd space in the film. They are a space of transition between the city and the trailer home. Though they lie outside the city, they are not really pastoral or natural, bordered as they are by the busy road. They are also where two crucial moments of conflict take place: one where Rosetta fights with her mother and is thrown into the water as she physically tries to restrain her; the other where Riquet, her only friend, accidentally falls into the water and Rosetta almost lets him drown, as he is sucked in by the mud. The first scene sees Rosetta, the strong, stubborn woman, turned into a vulnerable young girl as she cries for her mother to help her out of the mud that is pulling her down. In the other scene, Rosetta is the one who is called to for help. These scenes of being trapped in quicksand, pulled into its depths, are highly symbolic moments. They are a physical echo of Rosetta’s fear of being ‘stuck in a rut’ as she calls it, of being

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unable to reach the safety and normalcy that work and middle-class status offer. ‘Rosetta is in a state of war. . . . A climate of war between the side of Rosetta and the side of society. So appears society to the one thrown outside of it: as a fortress which one cannot enter’.20 Extending this idea, in an interview about the film, Jean-Pierre Dardenne says, ‘[t]o us, Rosetta was a war film, and she was a soldier going off to war’;21 in a later interview, Luc Dardenne continues, ‘Rosetta is a warrior who never gives up. She is a survivor who lives in a primary state: water, shelter, food. She has found her own weapons, a survival system: boots for the campsite, shoes for work, a box for bait, bottles for fishing’.22 The woods, then, work at several levels of meaning: they occupy a liminal position between the city and the home, a threshold Rosetta has to cross over every day as she goes to work and then makes a return. But given that this is a ‘war film’, the woods are also the site where this war is enacted, where she has to fight for her survival, fight against the janitor, her mother and with herself as she decides whether to save Riquet. But, simultaneously, the woods are a space of escape: a space where Rosetta has learned to survive, where she has worked out a survival system that in some ways allows her to rely on her own ingenuity, but one that is always under threat. It is not accidental then that it is a space of conflictual passions as well as of emotional intensity that give insights into Rosetta, both the character and the film. Her struggle in the quicksand—as she tries to free her limbs and keep her head above the surface—is a tangible realisation of the ‘social euthanasia’ that pursues her and makes her suffocate: the turbid pool is an actualisation of the social relations that make sure she is never able to lift herself out of that life whose every moment is an existential struggle.23 In The Silence of Lorna, the woods feature prominently at the end of the film. Again, located on the outskirts of the city, lying alongside the motorways that lead out of it, the woods become, for Lorna, a space of refuge and of amelioration in what is otherwise a moral wasteland. An Albanian girl who marries a Belgian drug addict in order to acquire his nationality, she ends up feeling a tenderness for him that she had initially tried hard to avoid. Unable to save Claudy from the heroin overdose that the mafia who control her have planned for him, Lorna begins to believe that she is pregnant with his child. At the end of the film, seen as unstable and therefore unable to participate in another sham marriage, she is being sent back home. However, the suggestion is that this will be the last journey she will ever make. Sensing the danger she is in, Lorna manages to get away from the man to whom she has been entrusted, escaping into the woods. The absence of Claudy, the junkie, is filled by this baby for Lorna, but the baby too is an absence. In a stunningly crafted inversion, Lorna’s increasing insanity, her psychosis,

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becomes her increasing humanity. She wants to protect this illusory baby in the way she was unable to protect Claudy.24 The forest in this scene is captured beautifully. The gentle light filtering through the trees gives the moment a romantic, lyrical quality. Lorna finds an empty cottage where she makes herself at home, speaking to the unreal baby about an imagined tomorrow. As the scene fades into darkness, the credits roll. For the first time, here, the Dardennes have added music to their credits. In an interview Luc Dardenne explained that they felt that they could not leave the spectators alone, and they could not leave Lorna alone.25 The music and the woods come together in this final moment, giving it a heartbreaking beauty and tenderness that stays with the audience even though we are aware that this is just an illusion, that there is no real future for Lorna outside of this moment. These wooded areas are furtive, fragile spaces that act almost as cinematic interludes of selfhood in both these films. Woodlands on the edges of a city, these are undesired, unclaimed spaces but, at the same time, these unnatural spaces are lived in as natural places, as part of a saturated romantic narrative. Even though the female leads in these films (Rosetta and Lorna) are pushed into these left-over spaces of the city, on its physical margins, it is as if they are able to create new relations with nature and new narratives. It is these other relations and narratives that we see as spaces of alterity, of mutation and maturation. Such a re-appropriation also takes place with motorways.

MOTORWAYS In all Dardenne films, the motorway is a key element in making sense of place and in depicting the post-industrial atmosphere that determines the intensities of the characters. We know, after Auge´, that motorways are nonanthropological places—what he calls non-places—precisely because they are opposed to anthropological places, where traditions, rituals and language are rooted.26 What Auge´ terms ‘supermodernity’ is defined by the proliferation of non-places at the detriment of anthropological places. In other words, villages, churches, even factories, disappear from both the landscape and from everyday life, being replaced by hotels, motorways, metros and shopping centres, which then impose a certain kind of anonymity and homogeneity. A motorway that is shown on screen repeatedly is the one that Rosetta has to cross in order to reach the ‘Grand Canyon’ campsite; she hides before crossing the road as if she were ashamed of living on the other side, or rather ashamed of being seen crossing the left-over spaces which are the motorway and the small forest next to the road. But this particular kind of left-over space is even more prominently featured in The Child. The motorways, roads and

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bridges play a significant role in mapping Bruno’s life of petty crime and obsessive trading. At the beginning of the film, we discover that Bruno has sublet the flat he was sharing with his girlfriend while she was in hospital, giving birth to their son. Bruno lives lightly, freely, with a strange mixture of guile and naivety, and for some instant money is willing to sell his child. With absolute ease, he can spend his nights at a night shelter, or make himself at home in a cardboard box in an abandoned cabin under a bridge on the banks of the river Meuse. It is on this patch of green between a motorway and the river full of industrial waste, crossed by a bridge and used as a junkyard, that Bruno spends most of his time when he is not cheating, stealing or scamming. He keeps his stolen goods and all the other traces of his thefts here, turning this dilapidated shack into a dysmorphic home that holds his meagre store of ragged, scavenged and filched possessions. The dull grey of the river forms the backdrop of most of the scenes that are shot in this location. The Meuse is in fact one of the key elements, along with the pram, which led Luc and Jean Dardenne to write the script of The Child, as Luc Dardenne reports in his diary. The river gave a new spatiality to their film: a desire to enlarge the plan of their film and not to simply produce a closed cinematic experience, not to remain with the handheld camera close to the bodies.27 Throughout the film, we see Bruno walking alone by the motorways, as the cars whiz past, but with the arrival of baby Jimmy, Bruno has to try harder to retain the lightness with which he moves through life. This is part of the reason why he finds it so easy to sell Jimmy for adoption; he sees the baby as another package that can be exchanged for ready cash. The situation becomes more complicated and sinister as he tries to get the baby back, unwittingly entangling himself with a powerful criminal organisation. But this emotional journey where Bruno learns to take responsibility is visually realised through his walking of the motorways. While at the beginning of the film, Bruno moves quickly, zigzagging between the speeding traffic, he is hampered by Jimmy’s pram after Sonia’s return from the hospital. The camera moves with him as he pushes the pram through the bleakly rendered city, waiting for the traffic light to change before he crosses the road, his restlessness palpable. It is precisely when he is left alone with Jimmy and his awkward pram that Bruno decides to sell him, but this transaction does not bring back the former lightness. Not only does Sonia leave him—refusing to forgive him even when he brings Jimmy back—he is still left walking around with an empty pram. Mimicking the previous scenes, we see Bruno traversing the same streets, crossing the same roads, with the now useless pram. Later still, the pram is exchanged for a broken scooter after a failed theft, and the camera follows Bruno as he pushes the scooter through the city. The motorway by the riverbank intensifies the left-over aspect of the

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Meuse in The Child, and the river is neither romanticised nor superficially embellished. The Meuse is then the ideal place to seek refuge when the attempt to snatch a handbag goes horribly wrong. Bruno’s precarious lifestyle of petty crime suddenly and violently takes a more serious turn as he attempts to elude the two men who have also called the police. Trying desperately to find a place to hide, Bruno and his young accomplice, Steve, attempt to conceal themselves in the freezing water: a moment of equal danger and shame. Echoing the scene from Rosetta, where Rosetta fights the mud to make her way to the safety of the shore, Bruno comes out of the highly polluted water soaked to the bone while Steve almost drowns.28 O’Shaughnessy reads this scene as one where the body expresses that which cannot be expressed in language. In these near-drownings in both films, the characters are ‘literally submerged by an unmediated reality above which they are no longer able to rise’.29 Bruno feels the limits of the city; even in this left-over space which had been his habitual haunt, he cannot really find any safety. This immersion in the Meuse is not a ceremonial cleansing of his sins or a purification of the soul; it is a moment of awakening consciousness. His quick smiles and small dreams are gone, and his entry into the prison is also his entry into the awareness that he is outside the fortress that cannot be breached.

WHAT IS A LEFT-OVER SPACE? These left-over spaces function in relation to the characters portrayed in the films, the Dardennian cartography coming into existence once these protagonists are anchored, or embedded in a specific environment. This is an environment which they define and which in turn defines them. The left-over spaces in Dardenne films can only be understood in this dual productive relationship. This confirms what we know from Lefebvre: that space is not a neutral element, but the result of a social fabric.30 The space of the city and the space of the cinematic image come together in their films according to what we could call their ‘principle of hiding’: ‘Where to place the camera? In other words: what do I show? In other words: what do I hide? Hiding is without any doubt essential’.31 Luc Dardenne learns this principle, that then develops into an aesthetics of omission, through his reading of Bazin’s book on Jean Renoir, explaining that what counts more is not the framing of the image but the hiding of the surroundings.32 The sense of the environment and the place—the run-down houses, the rusty steel industries and the vacant and sacrificed spaces33 —where the quasiheroic figures will start their mission or their war is always present in the texture of each film even though it is never talked about, or at least not

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directly. The place is rarely the primary focus of the shot. On the contrary, the characters are present in all the shots: they populate them, so that the screen and the camera become an extension of their body, ‘a body-camera’ (corps-came´ra).34 If, for Deleuze, the creative moment lies in the disjunction between the visual and the aural,35 between the gaze and the voice, then, for the Dardenne brothers, the creative arises from the interaction between gesture and silence, where it is the bodies that speak. The silence of the intense shots, simultaneously simple and complex, reveals a secret speech coming from both the gestures and the spaces. This muted expression is both invisible and infinite, and yet so banal, so ordinary: We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a character makes—how he passes a cup to someone else, how he pours coffee into his cup. This is more interesting than presenting actions as pretexts for talking. Words come afterwards, when you cannot do anything else. In general I think there is too much talking in movies; it is an easy thing to do. But why clutter up a film with chattering?36

It is in this banality that the intensity of the Dardennes’ cinema stretches in all its dimensions and gains its thickness. The spectators learn to glance out of windows, think about what lies behind walls, look over shoulders and imagine the outside of the frame that can perhaps explain the complex facial features of all the characters.37 The spatial depth present in the Dardennes’ films is a continuation of the body: ‘For us who shoot, the image is neither the incarnation of an invisible nor the disembodiment [de´sincarnation] of a visible, but it is visible, and by remaining visible it speaks the invisible’.38 And this declaration shares much with Deleuze’s claim that cinema does not produce images that are reducible to subjective perceptions,39 or as Luc Dardenne writes again, the objective is ‘not to bureaucratise the imaginations’.40 The ontological status given to the gestures of the Dardennian characters is there precisely because of the spatial anchor. If the bodies and their gestures organise and order the words of speech, the fragments of dialogues are only there to settle on the bodies, sometimes wrapping themselves around the bodies. Both the woods and the motorways are part of the vocabulary that the Dardenne brothers use to express the subjectivity of their characters. In their films, they manage to make use of these left-over spaces, the dregs of industrialisation, and turn them into spaces that allow for the unfolding of new relations, new narratives and new selfhoods. These are places that are invisible to the measured rhythm of everyday life, to the capitalist enterprise, to the ‘normal’ functioning of the city. The Dardenne brothers attempt to reveal

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the invisible part of gestures that are usually forgotten in cinema. But these gestures do not happen nowhere; they happen in the invisible place of the city, in the scattered, marginal, dirty, yet truly resisting and existential sites that still exist within it. Challenging Auge´’s definition of non-place as a nonanthropological locus, they have succeeded in turning it into a humanising space, a space of potential, where there is a hope for this world. Not only do these films open up spaces of resistance within what are otherwise the discarded remnants of modern cities, the cinematic space of the films itself becomes a space of alterity and resistance. Speaking of their documentary filmmaking in workers’ areas earlier in their career, Luc Dardenne explains the rationale of their choice of subject: A lot of these workers’ estates have no communal space, and so there’s no place for people to talk to each other, so we decided we would go and film these people and tell their stories, perhaps of moments in their lives where they come up against some injustice. So we would film them during the week and then on the weekend show the films in a cafe or a local church. And that was a way for people to see and listen to other people in the same estate. We did that for a few years, and then we started to build on that experience and to write our own stories. That’s how it developed.41

These films, then, arise from a desire to tell stories that have no other place to be told in, and to bring into the centre the marginalised people who populate our cities. The characters that they depict in these three films are not even the working classes, but the de´classe´, those who are absolutely outside the economy defined by ‘productive’ work. Claudy, for instance, in The Silence of Lorna is recurrently called ‘the junkie’, and it is legitimate to kill him: because he is a junkie, because junkies are useless, because no one will miss a junkie, because he would have died of an overdose at some point anyway. The humanisation of Claudy, which starts by naming him, is also the first step in the humanisation of Lorna. It is this process of humanisation of those who remain unnamed and unseen that these films attempt. Becoming human, regaining dignity and an individuated selfhood is the journey taken by Rosetta, Lorna and Bruno. It is a journey that comes at a price—Rosetta’s attempted suicide, Lorna’s psychosis and Bruno’s jail sentence—but never are these characters subjected to our pity.

NOTES 1. Luc Dardenne, Au dos de nos images (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 9. 2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘What Is a Creative Act?’ in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 322.

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3. The night Rosetta stays over at Riquet’s flat, lying in bed she repeats to herself: ‘You are Rosetta. I am Rosetta’. In Two Days, One Night, Sandra has to ask each of her co-workers whether they will vote for her to remain in her job or receive their bonus, and through this repetition ad nauseam, she begins to believe in her right to hold on to her job. 4. Bert Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Essays and Interviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). 5. For a brief but clear summary of their early work, see Martin O’Shaughnessy, ‘Eloquent Fragments: French Fiction Film and Globalization’, French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 3, Winter 2005, pp. 75–88. For a more detailed understanding of the development of their oeuvre, see Philip Mosley, The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism (Columbia University Press, 2013). 6. R. D. Crano, ‘‘‘Occupy without Counting’’: Furtive Urbanism in the Films of JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne’, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2009, pp. 11–12. 7. Sarah Cooper, ‘Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers’, FilmPhilosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2007, p. 68. 8. Joseph Mai, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p. xi. 9. Philip Mosley, ‘Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema’, Yale French Studies, No. 102, 2002, pp. 164–66. 10. As Luc Dardenne puts it in one of their interviews: ‘You know how winter is in northern Europe. Winter light makes the colours come out: the red, the black, the gray, the flowers, in all their intensity. Winter sunlight is not a sunlight that crushes’. Karin Badt, ‘The Dardenne Brothers at Cannes: ‘‘We want to make it live’’’, in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Essays and Interviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 144. 11. Robert Porter, ‘Habermas in Pleasantville: Cinema as Political Critique’, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 6, No. 4, p. 406. 12. The impact of film’s searing social and political critique is evident in the Belgian government’s decision to pass the ‘Rosetta Plan’. This was a law proposed in 1999, shortly after the film’s release, that would try to generate and develop employment for young, low-skilled workers that make up a large part of the chronically unemployed. Under this law, businesses with over fifty employees are obliged to hire 3 percent of their workforce from this floating population of young people. Lauren Berlant, in her detailed essay looking at Rosetta, notes that reviews of the film suggested that it was ‘barely fictive in its dramatisation of generally contingent economic conditions as well as those among youth, but Rosetta was read as strongly exemplary of a generation of the willing, able, and economically unacknowledged’. Lauren Berlant, ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: PostFordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’, Public Culture, Vol. 19, No. 2, p. 274. For more on the social realism of Rosetta see Janice Morgan, ‘The Social Realism of Body Language in ‘‘Rosetta’’’, The French Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp. 526–35. 13. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 72. 14. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 158. 15. Cooper, ‘Mortal Ethics’; Marc-Emmanuel Me´lon, ‘Entre e´thique et esthe´tique: la pense´e d’Emmanuel Le´vinas dans le cine´ma de Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne’, paper presented at the conference Film as exercise of thought and public gesture, K. U. Leuven,

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2–4 February 2010 (unpublished); Marle`ne Zarader, ‘La promesse et l’intrigue (phe´nome´nologie, e´thique, cine´ma)’, Cite´s, 2008, No. 33, pp. 83–96. 16. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 28. 17. Luc Dardenne in Joan West and Dennis West, ‘Taking the measure of human relationships: An interview with the Dardenne brothers’, in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 132. 18. Jean-Pierre Dardenne in West and West, ‘Taking the measure of human relationships’, p. 131. 19. The recent work of Guillaume Le Blanc is particularly useful in understanding the role of visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion in the public space. He argues that these social existences—marginalised, declassed, unemployed, voiceless lives—are not caused solely by individual behaviour but also governed and regulated by norms. See Guillaume Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies pre´caires (Paris: Seuil, 2007), and Guillaume Le Blanc, L’invisibilite´ sociale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009). Le Blanc refers directly to Rosetta in L’invisibilite´ sociale, p. 25. 20. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 66. 21. Jean-Pierre Dardenne in Geoff Andrews, ‘Talking to Palme D’Or Winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’, in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 157. 22. Luc Dardenne in Bert Cardullo, ‘The Cinema of Resistance: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’, in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 193. 23. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 107. 24. O’Shaughnessy reads the film through the issue of debt and sees Lorna as ‘the indebted subject’ (drawing on Maurizio Lazzarato’s work), owing money to Fabio’s gang, love to her boyfriend Sokol, but also something unnameable, more to Claudy. Martin O’Shaughnessy, ‘The Crisis before the Crisis: Reading Films by Laurent Cantet and JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne Through the Lens of Debt’, SubStance, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2014, pp. 82–95. 25. Luc Dardenne in Philip Concannon, ‘Interview: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’ in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 185. Luc Dardenne wrote in his diary in 1998: ‘Q. Why don’t you have music in your film? A. For not blocking your eyes’. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 85. 26. Marc Auge´, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 51–53. 27. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 169. 28. In fact, we learn from the diary that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne had read of a similar incident in the local news section of a newspaper. In September 2003, in Seraing, a young petty criminal drowned in the Meuse after stealing the handbag of a lady and trying to hide in the river by gripping the grass and the weeds of the riverbank. As he did not know how to swim and the grass was not robust enough to hold him, he died in the river. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 155.

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29. Martin O’Shaughnessy, ‘French Cinema and the Political’, Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2010, p. 43. 30. Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), p. 35. Doreen Massey, building on Lefebvre’s work, also conceptualises space in terms of social relations. This formulation is based on three propositions that Massey makes explicit: first, that this space is a product of interrelations and constituted through interactions, through certain embedded practices; second, this space contains the possibility of multiplicity, of coexisting heterogeneity; third, this is a space that is always under construction, never quite finished, imaginable as ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’. Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 9. 31. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 55. 32. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 22. 33. In his critique of The Child, Le Monde journalist Jean-Pierre Stroobants gives a description of Seraing: ‘This city is lined by overground gas and water pipes, it is sullied by industrial waste, literally sacrificed to metallurgy, hell and pride for those who approached it, facing unemployment, misery and the destruction of social links. ‘‘We were married to the Cockerill factories, but our grandchildren are orphans of everything,’’ explains Louis, a retired unionist’. Jean-Pierre Stroobants, ‘A Seraing, les fre`res Dardenne ont fait fusionner re´alite´ et fiction’, Le Monde, 18 October 2005. 34. Cooper, ‘Mortal Ethics’, p. 76. On the fully developed concept of the body-camera in Dardenne films, see Mai, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. 35. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 266–67. 36. Jean-Pierre Dardenne in West and West, ‘Taking the measure of human relationships’, pp. 129–30. 37. Crano, ‘‘‘Occupy without Counting’’’, p. 11. Also, Jean-Pierre Dardenne explains: ‘[W]e try . . . to film something that resists us. And we try not to show everything or see everything. The character and the situation remain in the shadows and this opacity, this resistance, gives the truth and the life to what we’re filming’. Jean-Pierre Dardenne in Cardullo, ‘The Cinema of Resistance’, p. 190. Sarah Cooper argues that, in The Son, bodies overflow the frame to create new sensations; we can extend this point to the postindustrial city depicted in their films. Cooper, ‘Mortal Ethics’, pp. 72, 75. 38. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 122. 39. ‘Subjectivity, then takes on a new sense, which is no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual: that which ‘‘is added’’ to matter, not what distends it; recollectionimage, not movement-image’. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 46. 40. Dardenne, Au dos, p. 17. 41. Luc Dardenne in Andrews, ‘Talking to Palme D’Or Winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’, p. 147.

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Chapter Three

Arundhati Roy’s Language of Politics

He left his voice behind. —Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 326 Who are the world’s real curators, or should we say the real world’s curators? What is the real world? Are things we cannot imagine, measure, analyze, represent and reproduce real? Do they exist? Do they live in the recesses of our mind in a Fort that has never been attacked? When our imaginations fail, will the world fail too? —Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers, 204

THE HYPHENATED WRITER Sentences that shatter their structures, words that implode, sounds that lay open the arbitrariness of language itself. This is a writing of exuberance, of sheer ecstasy, able to capture fleeting, fragile joy, but also familiar with the vernacular of pain, of rage. It is a writing that attempts to excavate silence in order to find that which is worth hearing, that which is all too frequently muffled. Emphasising knowledge based on the sensory and the emotional, private memories and public histories merge together to form narratives that are laden with meaning. But this dwelling in the personal does not lead us into solipsism, into an interiority cut off from the noise of the world, but 47

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rather into the very depths of that world, into the subterranean desires and torments that it is rooted in. Challenging ‘edges, borders, boundaries, brinks and limits’,1 it is a writing of liminality and of margins; it revels in border crossings, in troubling the permissible limits of who is touchable, who is lovable, who is expendable. In doing this, it meditates on what it means to be human. Humanity, this writing would suggest, lies in the small things that make up the sum total of our reality, ordinary hopes and ordinary losses that can set off unexpected riptides. But we have dulled ourselves to these kinds of tragedies, born of frequency, repetition and ordinariness. Arundhati Roy’s writing places us squarely in front of such horrors, forcing us to confront them, to hear again that ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’,2 compelling us to ‘tune in’.3 Silence then is central to her storytelling, and we are invited to listen close so as to hear the whispers, thoughts, feelings, caresses left out of mainstream historiography and the hagiography of the Indian nation-state. * * * Arundhati Roy’s first and only novel so far, The God of Small Things, was published in 1997 to wide critical acclaim and commercial success, but it was also trailed by controversy regarding its literary merit and its politically

Figure 3.1 Pradip Krishen, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, 1989. Courtesy of Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen.

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correct mix of the authentic and the exotic.4 Despite expectations of another work of fiction, Roy has firmly established herself in the genre of the essay, a form of writing she was already engaged in even before her meteoric rise as a Booker-winning novelist. In August and September 1994, Roy had published a two-part review of Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, ‘The Great Indian Rape-Trick’ (I and II), in which she presented a searing critique of its portrayal of Phoolan Devi, whose life the film was based on, and its claim to truthfulness.5 In this early article, we already see Roy’s interest in questions of gender and caste violence, which she returns to again and again in fiction and non-fiction, as well as the sense of responsibility she argues an artist/ writer/filmmaker takes on when representing other voices and other lives. Not only did the article condemn the manipulative way in which Phoolan Devi’s body was put on display, repeatedly brutalised and raped, in the name of truth, but also the ideologically telling interpretation of her life story that only showed her in the role of victim who then seeks revenge, in the manner of the usual ‘Rape n’ Retribution’ film. For Roy, what is at stake in this film is the nature of the real itself: what counts as real, and how a work of art might attempt to represent reality with all its chaos and unreliability. This is an unrelenting adherence to a kind of storytelling that demands responsibility of the interpreter and is a constant feature of Roy’s writing. Roy herself has attributed this decided move from fiction to non-fiction to a deepening political commitment, which can more directly be addressed in her role as an essayist, in a writing that is about a ‘very urgent and immediate politics’.6 Since winning the Booker prize, Roy has intervened in fiercely contested political discussions, and written on a range of issues—‘The End of Imagination’ (1998) criticised India’s nuclear armament, ‘The Greater Common Good’ (1999) India’s approach to industrialisation particularly in relation to big dams and ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’ (2001) condemned the neo-imperialism and global policies of the United States. More recently, she has written about the Indian government’s heavily armed offensive against the Maoist groups in central India, calling it a ‘war on the poorest people in the country’, in her essay ‘Walking with the Comrades’ (2010), and has followed this up with a number of powerful articles about the politics of aggression and repression pursued by the Indian state. It is this prolific essay writing and active involvement in various grassroots movements that has led to her being labelled a ‘writer-activist’; Roy writes in ‘The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave It to the Experts?’: ‘I am, apparently, what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a ‘‘writer-activist’’. (Like a sofa-bed.)’.7 Emphasising the hyphen in the middle (writer-hyphen-activist/sofa-hyphen-bed), Roy quips on the arbitrarily assigned functional nature of such nomenclature. This is a formula that is as

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cliche´d as it is inaccurate, and draws a line that separates her literary writing from her political writing, a separation that Roy herself has rejected: I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist? True, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction, but it’s no less political than any of my essays. True, the essays are works of non-fiction, but since when did writers forgo the right to write non-fiction?8

With her usual acuity, she argues that she has been saddled with this ‘doublebarrelled appellation, this awful professional label’ precisely because she refuses to remain on the sidelines and speak in ambiguities. She takes sides. While the novel, however political it may be (and it is), allows her to remain an outsider, in these essays she becomes very much an insider, someone who is deeply involved and unashamed of baring her partisanship. However, as Roy points out, this Janus-faced term ‘writer-activist’ is strategically deployed to cut down to size both writers and activists, for it suggests that writers are too ‘effete to come up with the clarity, the explicitness, the reasoning, the passion, the grit, the audacity and, if necessary, the vulgarity, to publicly take a political position. And conversely, it suggests that activists occupy the coarser, cruder end of the intellectual spectrum’.9 It is also so dangerous because in becoming a professional designation, it attempts to professionalise protest, implying that the business of analysis, criticism and opposition is best left to the professionals, the experts. These are not ideologically empty implications, for they make the realm of protest—the march, the rally, the sit-in, the occupation, the strike, the picket, the rebellion—closed off to ordinary people. The future is too important, Roy argues, to be left to the experts. In writing this chapter, we take for granted the political nature of Arundhati Roy’s fiction as well as non-fiction writings and her commitment to a critical politics. There is no rupture between her fictional and other writing, and in fact her relocation from fiction to non-fiction is not a move from the apolitical to the political. Indeed, for Roy fiction is a more complex and challenging genre than the essay, for it deals with ‘a deeper, more subversive kind of politics’, but this present moment calls for a less ambivalent form of writing.10 Across these different genres, Roy’s political voice is surprisingly consistent and becomes increasingly incisive in its indictment of dominant politics over the course of her career. We will examine here the issue of marginality in Roy’s work. Essential to her writing is the question of power and how it may be rebalanced in a way that is more just; for her it is not enough to bear witness: it is necessary to give a hearing to those who have been silenced. Language then becomes the site for struggle. In focusing on the ways language operates in her work, we want to question indeed how she

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Figure 3.2 Pradip Krishen, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, 1989. Courtesy of Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen.

lays open the workings of language and therefore the subtle machinations of power that penetrate the language of the everyday. Resistance for her then lies as much in action as in learning the searing possibilities of language, in cracking open the grand narratives of progress and development told by collusions of state and corporate interests. Roy has often been accused of elitism, for being too critical of India’s economic success, and even of sedition, as in 2010 when an enquiry supported by both government and opposition leaders was launched into her comments calling India ‘a hollow super-power’. Our attempt in this chapter then is to consider how in constructing a language in which to speak of marginality, she has also developed a language of protest and political critique. It is perhaps because she has used her own celebrity to bring attention to these causes that exist on the edges of political doxa, using a language combining beauty and power, that she has provoked such extreme responses. In our analysis we will be looking at Roy’s screenplay for the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and the hybrid place occupied by English-speaking, urban Indian students, as well as some of her more recent essays on contemporary Indian politics shedding light on overlooked struggles, like those of the Naxalites, the Kashmiris and the Narmada Bachao

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Andolan. This movement that her career has charted from her training as an architect, to scriptwriter, to writer, to essayist, is one that she has described as ‘a process of refining a way of thinking, of seeing the world’.11 Building on this continuity of vision, and a confirmation of commitment, for Roy, language and marginality are deeply connected, with the process of marginalisation consisting of not just a lack of access to resources, but also a lack of access to a certain kind of language. The political space that Arundhati Roy creates is her language itself: the surface of the text and the texture of words are there to make room for politics in art. Her language is an intervention, an interpellation of other things, other problems, other human beings, but also a gathering of stories, experiences and lives.

THE CRACKS OF A GENERATION A film is not a poem, but there is something strangely poetic about In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Even though it has now attained the status of a cult classic, it continues to feel like a secret find: funny, naive and unexpectedly prescient. Though the original print of the film is now lost, and it is not really part of the scholarly work that Arundhati Roy’s quickly growing oeuvre is generating, we think it is an essential part of Roy’s development, in particular the way in which she comes to construct the link between politics and aesthetics, between politics and language.12 A campus film in which not very much happens, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones hands over the reins of its narrative to its motley crew of students rushing to prepare the final projects that would mark the end of their degree. The simple plot opens the space for these characters to find a voice and shows a young Indian middle class that is eager to find an identity that is other than simply another market for world economy, that is, other than appearance and marriage and a white-collar career. While Roy is often accused of being an idealist, this might not be a bad word in such a cynical world, a land of opportunity only if you study for an MBA and marry the right person. Indeed, the frustrations that the film expresses remind us that this is a world in which 80 percent of the people who live on two dollars a day can be forgotten if the government spends enough money on the military occupations: since 1980 there have been between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand military troops occupying Kashmir, making it one of the most militarised region in the world; similarly, the Naxalites, labelled ‘India’s greatest security threat’ in 2010, have been brutally suppressed not only because they are poor but because they have violently resisted being evicted from their ances-

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tral land for the benefit of international corporations seeking to excavate mineral resources. The film was directed by Pradip Krishen, and Roy wrote the screenplay in the spring of 1988, based on her own experiences at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. She also acted in the film, in the role of Radha, one of the main protagonists. It was shot in the monsoon of the same year and screened on Indian national television, Doordarshan, only once. Roy comments on the response, ‘It was screened late one night on TV (Doordarshan) when most decent folks were fast asleep. The earth didn’t move. The world didn’t stop and take notice. Film festivals ignored it. Reviews were mixed’.13 While the film did not make any waves, passing by largely unnoticed, it did win two prizes at the Indian National Film Festival in 1989: Best Screenplay and the Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution—what Roy tongue-in-cheek calls ‘the most interesting (and least sought after) prize of all’ (Ibid., p. xii). The Eighth Schedule to the Indian constitution is a list of twenty-two languages, of which English is not one; the government of India is under obligation to take measures for the development of these languages. Language indeed comes through as one of the most prominent characters in the film, but though the film is in English, it is a strange, hybrid kind of English spoken by the students at the University of Delhi in the 1970s (or more specifically, 1974, the year in which the film is set). Writing on the rise of Hinglish, a combination of Hindi and English, in Indian cinema, Anjali Gera Roy points out that Krishen’s film ‘invented a new register of English’ that borrowed from the laid-back slang of students in elite institutions.14 This was a usage that was more relaxed about the relationship between different Indian languages and perceived English as simply another Indian language, while also acknowledging its limited reach in India. Roy herself speaks about how getting the language exactly right was central to the project, and the English used is an alloy—‘melted down and then refashioned, soldered together with Hindi (occasionally even a little Punjabi) . . . I found myself completely absorbed and fascinated by the idea of accurately reproducing the idiom and rhythm of the language’.15 Arundhati Roy’s hybrid language is part and parcel of her resistance—in this case, a resistance to the mainstream and homogenous idea of ‘Indianness’, a resistance to the monotonous patriarchy of everyday life in India and a resistance to her education that teaches her to see success in purely financial terms. The language used is urban, very of-the-moment and captures with playfulness and feeling a specific moment of youthfulness, friendship and incipient political consciousness. This very specific use of language makes the film even more uncommercial than its un-slick, technologically awkward and clearly low-

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budget feel would have made it. Roy herself points out that the enterprise ‘deliberately and almost by definition excluded most people and most of the ‘‘market’’. (Never mind the masses.)’.16 The lengthy and enigmatic title does not make sense either. Derek Malcolm, The Guardian critic, told Roy and Krishen that they would have to change the title because it does not mean anything in English.17 But it was precisely this sense of representing a small collegiate community, with its casual linguistic mixes and improvisations, that makes the film, even now, feel so refreshing and exciting. In the university slang that the characters use, to ‘give it those ones’ seems to mean ‘be up to one’s usual act’—though this is never explicitly explained. The story revolves around a group of final year architecture students who are about to submit their theses. The central location is the college hostel where the students live together in very close proximity, with shared rooms and no private spaces. They spend their time either working on projects or playing table tennis—the knocking of the ball in the background, interspersed with loud yells, creates the rhythmic background that makes night and day a seamless continuum. Annie, or rather Anand Grover, is in his fifth year for the fourth time. He spends his time looking after his pet hen that he keeps in his room and smoking marijuana. Rumour has it that the cause for his repeated failure lies in a prank played years ago when he was dared to go to the ‘staff bogs’ and ‘piddle’ next to the professor they call Yamdoot, the god of death, and then look over the side. Now Radha and her boyfriend Arjun decide to take Annie under their wing and help him pass. But first they need to get him to drop his thesis plan and go with the safer plan of recycling an older submission. This is Annie explaining his original plan: So I’ve got a freaked out idea. . . . It’s bloody revolutionary. . . . It could reverse the whole process of urbanisation, persuade buggers to stay in their villages instead of screwing themselves up in cities. [Annie does a headstand against the wall.] The genius of the plan lies in its bloody simplicity. What I’m proposing is that the government plants fruit trees on either side of the railway track. Fine? All over India. General janta [public] craps around the railway tracks anyway right? So the soil is bloody fertile, haina [isn’t it]? Now all you have to do is on every passenger train na, you attach a water carriage with two fountains that spray water on either side. What do you get? One hundred and twenty thousand running kilometres of fruit trees, man!18

Both Annie and Radha are resistant to the kind of architecture they are being taught; they refuse to build luxury hotels with seaside views and concrete box apartment blocks that serve the interest of those who are already privi-

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leged. While Annie’s response to what he calls the ‘urban-rural nexus’ is fantastically bizarre, Radha’s is strongly grounded in the politics of urban planning: who is visible in the city and who is not, who has power and who does not. As she puts it: Every Indian city consists of a ‘City’ and a ‘Non-city’. And they are at war with one another. The city consists of a number of institutions, houses, offices, shops, roads, sewage systems. . . . These institutions are designed by the architect-engineer. The non-citizen has no institutions. He lives and works in the gaps between institutions, he shits on top of the sewage system.19

The political edge of these words, spoken in outrage at her final viva voce, is further heightened by the refusal to hide away that anger in polite, inoffensive language. Speaking of the motivation behind the making of the film, Roy explains that she was tired of filmmakers in India turning the camera away from themselves, tired of their ‘behalfism’; middle-class urban people making films on behalf of the rural population. What she wanted to do was to look at her generation and its ‘confused, fractured hybrid selves’.20 The film’s use of this amalgamated language that moves fluidly between English, Hindi and Punjabi is also reflected in the music that the film uses, as it moves between Hindi film music and the Rolling Stones. The fluctuating language then emerges as a medium of creativity, parody, caricature and critical thought. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones perfectly captures the improbable moment, that is at the same time so un-extraordinary, of picturing the middleclass student who repeats his final year four times only to become the hero by passing his exam by palming off an old and unmemorable thesis as his own and threatening revenge in the final lines by planning to sue the professor who has held him back. In her foreword to the screenplay, printed more than a decade after the film was made, Roy calls it her rebound love affair but not one of those you end up regretting.21 This comment captures the bittersweet nostalgia that the film evokes, and even the conclusion—Annie becomes a professor, Radha dies—does not erode its exuberant optimism. As the film ends and the futures of the characters are revealed, we find out that Annie goes on to become an assistant professor at the same institute a year after Yamdoot’s retirement, and Radha becomes a writer but drowns while swimming in the sea before her first book comes out. For Kuortti, this ending shows an ironic upending: Radha’s idealism dies when she is drowned and Annie’s becomes subdued through institutionalisation as he replaces Yamdoot.22 But it would be a mistake to read this as cynicism or as a turning away from idealism. Rather it reminds us with gentle though dark humour that life has plans of its own. Indeed, it strengthens the sense of the film as a fragile

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and furtive moment of playfulness and eccentricity, where the constant humour and goodwill of student life turns even frugality into something more romantic and idyllic.

NAMING INTO EXISTENCE This consciousness of those who exist in the cavities of the city becomes increasingly clear-sighted and fused with a cutting political critique in Roy’s later writing. This is a writing that is rooted in multiplicity, a writing that insists on the polysemous nature of meaning and experience, and the necessity to recognise the danger of a single story, or following John Berger’s words that form the epigraph to The God of Small Things: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’. Roy’s 2010 essay ‘The Trickledown Revolution’ comes back to the imagery of the two-tier city that was key to Radha’s critique of architects as builders of piggy-banks. She speaks here of a group of pavement-dwellers who have got together in the centre of Delhi to protest. This is a terrible thing to have to say, but it’s true—you could smell the protest from a fair distance: it was the accumulated odour of a thousand human bodies that had been dehumanised, denied the basic necessities for human (or even animal) health and hygiene for years, if not a whole lifetime. Bodies that had been marinated in the refuse of our big cities, bodies that had no shelter from the harsh weather, no access to clean water, clean air, sanitation or medical care. No part of this great country, none of the supposedly progressive schemes, no single urban institution has been designed to accommodate them. . . . Not even the sewage system—they shit on top of it. They are shadow people, who live in the cracks that run between schemes and institutions. They sleep on the streets, eat on the streets, make love on the streets, give birth on the streets, are raped on the streets, cut their vegetables, wash their clothes, raise their children, live and die on the streets.23

Roy refuses to let India forget its poor in the fluorescent dream of ‘India Shining’. While the marketing of India to international and domestic tourists deliberately whitewashes poverty, even the surveys, reports and statistics that point out the inequalities on the ground cannot convey the press of unwashed bodies. For Roy, this poverty and its attendant indignity is real in its materiality, in its physical presence, and must be named and acknowledged. The Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (2009) is not only located in the slums of Mumbai but, driven by a purely market-oriented ideology, turns them into a glamorous backdrop of garish colours and grimy charm. But while poverty sells, the bodies of the poor remain problematic, with their

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inconvenient presence and effluvia. As she points out: ‘If the motion picture were an art form that involved the olfactory senses—in other words, if cinema smelled—then films like Slumdog Millionaire would not win Oscars. The stench of that kind of poverty wouldn’t blend with the aroma of warm popcorn’.24 Roy’s attempt here is to bring those who are poor and marginalised back into visibility, back into the public domain to which they have as much a claim as the middle classes, and do so in a manner that humanises and materialises, a manner that rests on empathy. This becomes even more evident when she speaks of the Maoists, the ‘comrades’ she writes about in ‘Walking with the Comrades’.25 Roy intends to make us question the usual explanation given for the military action that targets them as terrorists fighting for an outdated ideology, or worse, for nihilism. But while Indian national media is replete with stories of Maoist terror, the identity of these Maoists remains uncertain and ever-shifting: Are they the ones who have access to weapons and actively plot against the Indian state, do they include the villagers among whom they live, do they include their supporters and sympathisers, do they include children? These demarcations contract and enlarge according to the needs of the moment: the declaration that the state has deployed thousands of troops to fight the largest internal security threat since independence, accompanies the claim that the Maoists are a fringe group of extremists who have little public support in the areas they operate in. Who then are the Maoists? These are members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) which was formally established in 2004 and is one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. This party was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists are often also referred to as the Naxalites, a name that comes from a village called Naxalbari, in the Darjeeling district, where a land dispute broke out in 1967. In this area there was a long history of land scarcity and of bitter conflicts over land, with plantation workers seeking to own plots and indigenous sharecroppers fighting for respite from the extraordinary demands of landlords. These protests became more militant, leading to skirmishes with the police, which turned violent; the peasant leaders decided to take to arms, and soon the most predatory landlords had been beheaded. ‘‘Naxalbari quickly came to enjoy an iconic status among Indian revolutionaries. The village gave its name to the region and, in time, to anyone anywhere who would use arms to fight the Indian state on the behalf of the oppressed and the disinherited. ‘Naxalite’ became shorthand for ‘revolutionary,’ a term evoking romance and enchantment at one end of the political spectrum and distaste and derision on the other.’’26 The word Naxalite is now used interchangeably with Maoist.

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The Maoists that Roy writes about, and that the Indian state is at war with, are influenced by Mao’s teaching but this is also a misnomer—while the Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by a violent overthrow of the Indian state, it is important to be reminded once again, just as the state has found it convenient to forget, that tribal people in central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries. The history of this struggle has deep roots that reveal themselves in names: Dandakaranya was demarcated by the British as Gondwana, the land of the Gonds, and then broken into manageable administrative units to split up this troublesome people. But the Gonds refused to recognise these boundaries. Later, various Hindu organisations and god-men tried to bring these tribals within the Hindu fold by tempting the first converts with the status of the highest type of Brahmin, the twice-born. But as Roy points out, the con of this lies in the fact that ‘nobody can become a Brahmin’ or ‘we’d be a nation of Brahmins by now’.27 As part of this conversion, tribal names of villages and people were changed to Hindu names. And so in this land of liquid boundaries and identities, places and people came to have even more names. Those tribals who resisted this Hinduisation were declared ‘Katwas’, or untouchables, so creating further divisions within an already heterogeneous community, but also perforce including these resistant populations within a Hindu categorisation that put them at the very bottom of the hierarchy. In speaking of this violent resistance, Roy comes back to the question of ‘behalfism’—in whose name does the state of India wage a lingering war within its borders, making no attempt to speak to its proponents. Perhaps because they are not a single group, speaking a single language, that dialogue is a more difficult task. The Indian state’s custodianship of tribal homelands after independence, inherited directly from colonial policy, turned ‘the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land’.28 Denying ‘traditional rights to forest produce, [and] criminalis[ing] a whole way of life’ that is too nomadic and not in-line with the apparently free and fair open market seems far easier than trying to understand decades of state-sanctioned dispossession.29 Together with her, Roy wants India to question itself, and asks: Can a democracy really value its land more than its people? The problems of names and the politics of naming are crucial to Roy and form an important undercurrent in much of her writing. In In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, most of the characters are not called by their real names: Anand becomes Annie, and then there are Mankind, Big Tate, Paapey and Cycle Cheapskate whose real names we never know. This changeable identity comes to the fore in a more urgent and disturbing way in Dantewara. In ‘Walking with the Comrades’, Roy writes that the forest was ‘full of people

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who had many names and fluid identities’ and as she falls asleep in her ‘thousand-star hotel’, she wonders ‘Who should I be tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars?’ recalling one of the protagonists from her novel The God of Small Things.30 Later she meets another People’s Liberation Guerilla Army leader who has two names—Sukhdev and Gudsa Usendi—neither of which are his. Many comrades have been Gudsa Usendi at some point or another, and Sukhdev is the name of a beloved comrade who was killed in action. ‘In this war only the dead are safe enough to use their real names’.31 In this taking of other names, making multiple names, there is a double charge: one of the ease with which the flexibility and multiplicity of identity is understood by these tribal populations, and the other more dangerous one that necessitates disguise and impersonation. And while Roy seems to celebrate and romanticise one, she simultaneously recognises the precariously concealed network through which this organisation can function. Roy also takes pleasure in the languages of the comrades that she meets from different tribes, the songs they sing, and the accommodating flexibility of their language that shows itself in the unnerving way in which it has turned ‘RV’ (short for rendezvous) and ‘booby-traps’ into indigenous words, part of the local Gondi language. Handwritten notes on paper that are folded, refolded and stapled into little squares are called ‘biscuits’; eagerly awaited, they carry in them news from different parts of the organisation, what mission has succeeded and who has been killed. Unsurprisingly, the imaginative use of language is at the heart of Roy’s life project; her extended metaphors and profuse sensuous language pack a powerful punch. While, on the one hand, she opens language to trick it and find within it a new grammar, thereby bringing sudden insights, on the other hand, her work is also involved in exposing the way in which media and state propaganda use language to dehumanise and belittle the other. She writes again in ‘Walking with the Comrades’: The drive from Raipur to Dantewara takes about ten hours through areas known to be ‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. ‘Infest/infestation’ implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.32

Continuing with this language of aggression, it is no surprise that the paramilitary troops that are being sent to quash the Maoist threat as part of Operation Green Hunt are given totemic names like Grey Hounds, Scorpions and Cobras. And this licence to kill works alongside the government policy affectionately made into the acronym WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The proliferation of acronyms somehow turns these words and phrases into seem-

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ingly neutral and rational expressions: CSR (corporate social responsibility) which allows corporations of mammoth interests to get away with their greed by building a hospital here and a school there; MoUs (memorandums of understanding) signed secretly between the state and private firms that allow them to hollow out the earth under villages; and SEZs (Special Economic Zones), by which the state can turn certain regions into zones that are governed by economic laws that are more liberal than the laws governing the rest of the country. The language here is crucial precisely because it names the enemy, shapes identity and justifies a politics. Again, in the vernacular of the local police, the area controlled by the Maoists is called ‘Pakistan’, which in the communalised politics of modern India justifies much. Yet democratic politics should be unnameable (as Beckett could say), allowing for the people to make their mark within language, and add elements to it. What Roy wants to emphasise is not her role in representing these people, but the necessity for these people to be given a voice, to be given a hearing. In many ways, these Maoist rebels have moved away from the schema where poor citizens protest in the designated areas allowed for such demonstrations, and have forcibly taken control of their own stories. Roy points out the ways in which, in the forests of Dandakaranya, the comrades have not only learnt the use of weapons but also written songs, poems and plays about themselves and their lives. Her stay in the forest ends with her participation in the centenary celebration of the 1910 Bhumkal rebellion in which the Koyas rose up against the British. The master of ceremonies is called Comrade Leng, for ‘leng’ is the Gondi word for ‘the voice’. He is the head of the Chetna Natya Manch, or the cultural front of the party, and is proud to reveal that their repository consists of hundreds of songs in Hindi, Gondi, Chhattisgarhi and Halbi: ‘Everybody writes songs’.33 The celebration that takes place, apart from the expected speeches, consists of singing and dancing and storytelling that lasts well into the night. In the middle of Operation Green Hunt, the forest is on the move, swaying to a different set of drumbeats. But while Roy recognises the fragility and beauty of these resistant people (in the dark forest night it is hard to tell if it is ‘stars or fireflies or Maoists on the move’), she is also aware of the violence that underlies their political ideology.34 Charu Mazumdar, hailed as the father of Naxalism, was one of the founders of the Naxalbari movement and its chief theoretician. His language, she points out, is as brutal as that of the state: ‘His abrasive rhetoric fetishises violence, blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal’ (Ibid., p. 120). The charge then that she is blinkered to the violence of the Maoists, or that she is entirely seduced by their ideology, is rather facile.

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BEARING WITNESS Roy is particularly scathing about the irresponsible, sensationalist writing found in most Indian newspapers today. In ‘The End of Imagination’, she criticises the language of the media for celebrating India’s successful nuclear bomb tests: ‘Explosion of Self-esteem’, ‘Road to Resurgence’, ‘A Moment of Pride’, these were headlines in the papers in the days following the nuclear tests. . . . ‘These are not nuclear tests, they are nationalism tests,’ we were repeatedly told.35

What she hears and sees in these headlines is the repeated instances of communal violence, with ordinary people whipped into a frenzy by nationalistic slogans, that have patterned India’s history. This kind of mindless patriotism, easily tested, easily proved, is what she is attacking here, and this jingoistic language is tied up for her to very real events that must be remembered: the bloodshed of the partition in 1947, the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, the Gujarat genocide in 2002, among hundreds of others. It is this ‘language of aggression’ that is the enemy in this battle for the right to language, and that she consistently brings under scrutiny. She writes, I hoped [that these articles] would reveal some of the ways in which democracy is practised in the world’s largest democracy. (Or the world’s largest ‘demon-crazy’, as a Kashmiri protestor on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: ‘Democracy without Justice  Demon Crazy’).36

To avoid living among crazy demons, Arundhati Roy writes, and above all, she fights to find the elbow room for ‘critique’ in what is otherwise a depoliticised, air-conditioned, glittering promise of a modern India, which comes under the categorical imperatives of ‘Progress’ and ‘Development’. No one questions these universal concepts that every citizen of India is supposed to strive for and work towards. Her intention to speak about the Maoists in the forests of Central India is not to do with a desire to romanticise them, but a desire to show their humanity and their fight for an alternate politics of possibilities. This is one among many of her other articles that has focused on various kinds of resistances (in Kashmir, in the Narmada Valley) that have displayed in different ways the hope for something else. As she puts it, It’s a new space that’s been offered to us today. A new kind of challenge. It offers opportunities for a new kind of art. An art which can make the impalpable palpable, the intangible tangible, the invisible visible and the inevitable evitable. An art which can draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real. Bring it to book.37

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The contemporary moment is one of unimaginable potentiality, even as it seems to be teetering on the edge of collapse, and to capture this moment one needs a new kind of art and a new kind of politics. The kind of art Roy is searching for will not be easy or beautiful for its own sake, for the present moment demands more. It is an art that will shatter political certainties and call their upholders to account. What are Arundhati Roy’s politics after all? She is not interested in simply denouncing party politics or bureaucratic corruptions but aspires to a new politics of the street, or rather, a reclaiming of the street, along with a reclaiming of the ‘schools, hospitals, clinics, ambulance services, disaster management cells’ that are in the hands of the nationalist Hindu parties and ideologues, run as part of their charitable trusts.38 While the Left has remained stuck with its old formulas and its old dogma, unwilling or unable to see the reality of the people, Roy recognises that: The strength of the poor is not indoors in office buildings and courtrooms. It’s outdoors, in the fields, the mountains, the river valleys, the city streets and university campuses of this country. That’s where negotiations must be held. That’s where the battle must be waged.39

This explains why she speaks from the jungle, from Kashmir, from villages in valleys threatened by dams and university campuses, for this is where the power struggle is taking place. And in these places, she then wants ‘to reclaim romance’, ‘to find the courage to dream’: ‘either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us’ (Ibid., p. 40, 42). She writes because things are complicated enough that they need to be explained, yet not so complicated that no words should be uttered. In 1954–1958, Theodor Adorno reflected on the essay as a form, distinct both from scientific works and from artworks. The essay stands in between these two realms, since it has aesthetic qualities that are palpable and easily criticisable, ‘though it distinguishes itself from art through its conceptual character and its claim to truth free from aesthetic semblance’.40 Roy uses the medium of the essay as a way to cast a new form of public speech in India, but also as a comrade when she is travelling abroad. At the end of his life, Gilles Deleuze started to rethink the role of animals in art, using what he called the ‘zone of indiscernibility’, as a way to include animals and animality in the human world (contrary to Heidegger’s position for instance). This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man. This is the reality of becoming.41

On the same page, Deleuze draws the important distinction between ‘being responsible for’ and ‘being responsible before’ that is comparable to Roy’s

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own positioning as an intellectual, essayist and spokesperson. She speaks from the place of the witness; her writings attest the cruelty of the perpetrators together with the screams and tears of the people. There is a generosity in her writings that wants to tell the whole of the story and not only specific events or specific theories, but her commentaries are always commentaries about the health of Indian society, diagnosing its symptoms and imagining possible cures that do not shy away from desires. ‘The effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire,’ writes Adorno (‘Essay as form’, p. 152). In the same way as for the essayist for Adorno, Roy breaks free from the duty of objectivity in establishing her heuristic approach: ‘[l]uck and play are essential to the essay’.42 This approach does not abandon the domain of feelings and sensibility even when talking about rapes, killings, exploitation, corruption and the resistance of the people: What revolutionary person—in art, politics, religion, or elsewhere—has not felt that extreme moment when he or she was nothing but a beast, and became responsible not for the calves that died, but before the calves that died?43

Roy does not want to speak for the victims, for the oppressed, from a position of power and universality, but before them. It is the form of the essay that allows her to speak before the Indian people and not instead of them, by expressing shame.44 Her role is not that of a representative, but that of a witness who speaks.

NOTES 1. ‘Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons’. Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 3. 2. In a different time, Eliot writes of the reality of human sympathy which cannot but turn away from the constant tragedy of ordinary life: ‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity’. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 124. 3. Fred Dallmayr, ‘But on a Quiet Day . . . A Tribute to Arundhati Roy’, Logos, 3.3, http://www.logosjournal.com/dallmayr.htm (accessed 15 June 2015). 4. See Julie Mullaney, who meticulously charts the critical landscape that greeted Roy’s novel. Also see Alex Tickell’s account of the machinations of the global publishing industry that carefully marketed and managed the myth of Roy’s ‘discovery’ as a writer. Julie Mullaney, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Reader’s Guide (London:

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Continuum, 2002); Alex Tickell, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Routledge Study Guide (London: Routledge, 2007). More recently, Filippo Menozzi has challenged the scapegoating logic of the critics, including Mullaney, who have attacked Roy’s writing, her politics and her public persona. What is discomfiting about Roy is both her commercial triumph as well as her style, regularly described as hyperbolic, rhetorical, self-indulgent. See Filippo Menozzi, Postcolonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance (London: Routledge, 2014). 5. The articles were published in the now defunct Sunday magazine and are available at http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html (accessed 10 September 2015). 6. Arundhati Roy, ‘The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report’, an interview with Rajesh Joshi, Outlook India, 9 September 2011. The interview was first broadcast in Hindi on the BBC Hindi Service. 7. Arundhati Roy, ‘The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?’ Outlook, 14 January 2002. http://www.outlookindia.com/article/shall-we-leave -it-to-the-experts/214223 (accessed 21 July 2015). The essay is also included in The Algebra of Infinite Justice and Power Politics. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Roy, ‘The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report’, 9. 11. Arundhati Roy, In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones (Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p. x. 12. The exception is Joel Kuortti’s ‘City and Non-City: Political and Gender Issues in In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones’, in Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy, eds. Ranjan Ghosh and Antonia Navarro-Tejero (London: Routledge, 2009). 13. Arundhati Roy, ‘Foreword’, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones: The Original Screenplay, p. v. 14. Anjali Gera Roy, ‘The Politics of Hinglish’, in Lionel Wee, Robbie B.H. Goh, and Lisa Lim (eds.), The Politics of English: South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013), p. 28. 15. Roy, ‘Foreword’, pp. vii–ix. 16. Ibid., p. viii. 17. Though we have not been able to track this quote to source, it forms the only critical endorsement on the back cover of the screenplay. 18. Roy, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, pp. 13–14. 19. Ibid., p. 91. 20. Roy, ‘Foreword’, p. vii. 21. Ibid., p. v. 22. Kuortti, ‘City and Non-city’, p. 82. 23. Arundhati Roy, ‘Trickledown Revolution’, Broken Republic: Three Essays (Delhi: Penguin, 2012), p. 153. 24. Ibid. 25. Arundhati Roy, ‘Walking with the Comrades’, Broken Republic: Three Essays (Delhi: Penguin, 2012). 26. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 424. 27. Roy, ‘Walking with the Comrades’, p. 69. 28. Ibid., p. 43.

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29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., pp. 50, 57, 60. 31. Ibid., p. 99. 32. Ibid., p. 45. 33. Ibid., p. 96. 34. Ibid., p. 88. 35. Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (Flamingo, 2002), p.16. 36. Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009), p. xi. 37. Roy, ‘The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?’ 38. Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers, p. 39. 39. Ibid. 40. Theodore W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, The New German Critique, No. 32, Spring-Summer 1984, p. 153. We thank Anaı¨s Nony for bringing us to this essay. 41. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 18. 42. Ibid. 43. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 18. 44. Deleuze and Guattari also had this distinction in mind when they wrote about Auschwitz and Primo Levi in the early 1990s: ‘We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continue to undergo shameful compromises with it. This feeling of shame is one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs. We are not responsible for the victims but before them’. Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), p. 108.

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Ai Weiwei’s Useless Materials

One day, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Cuvier was to topple the glass jars of the Museum, smash them open and dissect all the forms of animal visibility that the Classical age had preserved in them. —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things1 Present-day art is not the sum of particular things but the topology of particular places. —Boris Groys, Art Power2

THE WEIGHT OF A WORLD Ninety tonnes of mangled steel rods straightened into lines, aligned together to form an undulating stack in a spectrum of rusty reds and browns. A hundred million porcelain seeds, each one carefully painted by hand, producing an expansive monochrome landscape. Reclaimed ironwood timber laid out into a delicately ridged, masterfully jointed, three-dimensional map of China. Qing dynasty tables, violently and with exquisite craftsmanship folded in half so as to begin their climb up the wall. There is something very earthy in this artwork, something that calls out an ani1znmal intensity along with a collected detachment. In an unsettling gesture, seemingly identical elements show their uniqueness—each corroded steel bar has been straightened by hand, hammered into shape, and each perfectly realised sunflower seed has been made by experienced artisans—and old, worn materials are recast into 67

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new forms—the wood from Qing temples and the antique tables become selfcontained bursts of new expression. These are pieces that are rooted in their materiality and history, and yet frequently cast off that weight with unexpected humour, in trajectories where they break out from their form. It is in this flight that we find something deeply moving and politically charged. There is a sense of connectedness with the long history of China and with its current moment, evidenced through the sensitive yet brutal way in which the material has been handled. Each piece bears the marks of its production, never hiding the traces of the workers who have brought it into being, and so contours the realities of the country itself. * * * Ai Weiwei is probably the most well-known artist examined in this book, but also the most controversial. After leading the ‘Citizens’ Investigation’ on the role of government corruption in the collapse of schools in Sichuan after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Ai became even more clearly recognised as a vocal dissident of the Chinese Communist regime. While Ai had been attacking the Chinese state for years for its lack of transparency, this particular act of confrontation led to his arrest in 2011. On his way to Hong Kong, he was arrested at Beijing airport and detained in solitary confinement for eighty-one days without any official charges. During this time, the police investigated his financial records and finally charged him with tax evasion. Even after his release, he continued to remain under surveillance and was prohibited from international travel. It was only in July 2015, just before his Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London, that his passport was returned. This sequence of events further catapulted Ai into political fame, and he became highly mediatised for his imprisonment and dissidence. Indeed, so widespread was his popularity as a political icon that when the Chinese government charged Ai over two million dollars in back taxes, thousands of people began lending him money in solidarity so that he could pay this sum.3 However, precisely because Ai has openly adopted the role of the political subversive, his work and his person polarise opinions. In this chapter, we want to discuss this tension at some length to find a more productive way to engage with Ai’s oeuvre. In the international media, his work often seems to warrant less attention than his words or his political positions, and in spite of his stardom, specific instances of Ai’s work can rarely be identified by the general public. If one were to mention Ai’s collaboration with the Swiss architects Herzog and Meuron on Bird’s Nest, the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games, almost making him a government-sponsored artist, this would be received with scepticism or suspicion. Because Ai’s work has been overdetermined by his persona, it has become reduced to his criticism of the Communist regime. The interpretation of his work is also condi-

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Figure 4.1 Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008–2012 (detail). Steel reinforcing bars, 1200 x 600 cm. Photo by Benoıˆt Dillet /  Ai Weiwei.

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tioned by the West’s relation with China more broadly, as well as the trends in art criticism. But as Brian Dillon invites us to think in a recent review of the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, Ai’s work is more than these simplistic interpretations: [T]here, precisely, is the problem for much of his art, whether unassumingly scaled or grandly imagined and engineered: Ai’s admirable if unenviable position as critic and victim of that state means the work is frequently reducible to a clear and courageous message. But can it be more than that? He is not exactly literal-minded.4

Ai’s hypermediatisation has been criticised either for its cynicism or for its elitism. From this perspective, his words and political stance can somehow be read as external to his artwork; this politicisation has been seen as an instrumentalisation, in order to bring his name to the current affairs columns of the newspaper and not only to the arts and culture weekend supplements. It is as if his occupation of the media space for his political activism can be reduced to a shameless publicity for his work. What is damaging about this stance on Ai’s work, however, is the cynical argument that today there can be no political art: ‘The suspicion of commercially exploiting media attention by means of political commitment thwarts even the most ambitious endeavors to politicise art’.5 Groys is right to find in this line of argument the affirmation of nostalgia for a time when works of art were precious, when artists were ‘authentic’ and not media icons. It is then fertile to read Ai Weiwei with Boris Groys since this allows us to consider critically Ai’s vertiginous use of new media. In an article symptomatic of many other criticisms launched at Ai, Rebecca Liao points out the easy universalisms and truisms that both the Chinese artist integrates in his work and that the audience is keen to find in Ai’s art (and words). Ai’s work is inauthentic, she argues, since it caters to a Western audience in need of reassurance about its own democratic model and ideals, built on an image of China as totalitarian, intolerant, artistically insensitive and so on.6 In her picture, Ai is both too Westernised in the way he militates for liberal values such as democracy, freedom of speech, artistic freedom and environmentalism, and too Chinese in the sense that, ‘hankering to cater to his [new-found] Chinese audience’, he portrays a classical China of jade and porcelain, and a history that has little to do with the contemporary moment.7 Following a completely different logic, Christian Sorace argues that Ai is not a mascot for Western democracy, but rather ‘China’s last Communist’: Ai’s three-month detention and subsequent house arrest are not merely examples of the government’s recent clampdown on dissent as it is presented in Western media coverage but must be understood, in an even broader context, as part of the Commu-

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Figure 4.2 Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008–2012 (detail). Steel reinforcing bars, 1200 x 600 cm. Photo by Ungry Young Man / Creative Commons 2.0.

nist Party’s economic neoliberalisation, depoliticisation of society, and the erasure of its Maoist past.8

For Sorace, Ai is a thorn in the side of the Chinese state because he is ‘too unapologetically Maoist’, and the portrayal of Ai as in thrall to the West is convenient for Chinese authorities since it allows a dismissal of his political stance. While we find Sorace’s reading compelling though not entirely persuasive, he is right to focus on Ai’s hyperpublic persona. We want to argue here that Ai’s hypermediatisation, in the way in which he is an object of widespread media attention but also in the form of his blogs, photos and self-surveillance, is exactly what places his work within ‘contemporary art’. Although this term can be misleading since it is deployed in a number of different ways, we can use Ai Weiwei’s work to trace some of the dominant characteristics of contemporary art or ‘post-conceptual art’.9 The role of contemporary art is techno-aesthetic, that is, it must diagnose the technicity that makes up the social milieu. Contemporary artwork can only be hypermediatised since our everyday life is hypermediatised; it can only respond to the vertiginous number of images produced and broadcast everyday (as discussed in chapter 1) by the creation of weak images that must mirror, yet resist, the visual hypersensibility:

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Chapter Four The contemporary mass media has emerged as by far the largest and most powerful machine for producing images—vastly more extensive and effective than our contemporary art system. We are constantly fed images of war, terror, and catastrophes of all kinds, at a level of production with which the artist with his artisan skills cannot compete.10

The contemporary artist cannot rival this media machinery yet she must compete with, or at least respond to, these new techniques of mass art production. For Groys, what defines the contemporary is ‘self-documentation’, a break from the earlier passion for collecting that defined nineteenth and twentieth century modernity. In this previous period of mass art consumption, artefacts of all sorts, even non-art objects, became objects of artistic contemplation.11 Today, contemporary mass art production resides in uploading pictures, videos and texts for self-design and self-documentation, and importantly this is done collaboratively as it calls for the participation and reaction of a circle of followers or ‘friends’. Contemporary art is then defined according to the context and framework it operates within; in the case of Groys’ analysis and our own, this context is the relationship between art production, technology and hypermediatisation. Francis Bacon explained in his famous interviews with David Sylvester

Figure 4.3 Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010. One hundred million hand-painted porcelain seeds. Photo by Andy Miah / Creative Commons 2.0.

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that the white canvas was filled with cliche´s that had to be destroyed in order for him to get to his figurations.12 Bacon was aware of the competition that photography as an amateur art had launched against painting, and painting was on its way towards becoming an archaic art form. But instead of ignoring photography and continuing to paint in accordance with the techniques and conventions established in the history of art, Bacon’s aim was to disfigure and transfigure the predictable lines that lay in wait in blank spaces. His paintings bear the vestiges of this internal conflict, which is a techno-aesthetic conflict. Art functions within a pre-established set of exceptions and references, ideas about ‘Western art’ and ‘Chinese art’, but these are superimposed by the art critic who often forgets that an artist is someone who introduces previously non-existent social and political differentiations.13 It is not art that avant-garde artists attempt to change but humanity itself, ‘the ultimate artistic act would be not the production of new images for an old public to view with old eyes, but the creation of a new public with new eyes’.14 It is at this level that art should be assessed: as creating new sensory organs, for art creates eyes just like it creates brains, stomachs or hearts, using the technical apparatus of its time.15 It creates a new spectator with sensibilities tuned into the rhythms of the new art, and organs that would respond to it.

FORGING TIME In the case of Ai, Chinese history is archived and narrated throughout his oeuvre, and the audience standing before his artwork needs to log into this narrative. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) is one of his most powerful artworks. In this photographic triptych, Ai indeed drops a Han dynasty urn as the title reads, but the provocation resides in his inscrutable expression. His face remains emotionless as his hands draw apart, fingers outspread, in a stop-motion–like movement. The urn, held gently between fingertips in the first photograph, is momentarily captured mid-fall (or perhaps mid-flight) in the second, and it lies shattered by Ai’s feet in the third. The black and white photography and the sparse staging make the urn the focus of the drama. This seemingly deliberate destruction of an ancient artefact demands a response from the viewer, just as much as the viewer demands a response from Ai. Not unexpectedly, Tim Marlow, the artistic director of the Royal Academy of Art in London, asks Ai about the reasons for this act, whether it was simply meant to be destructive or it was a way to remake something new out of something old (in this instance a photographic triptych), whether it was a provocation or a critical gesture. Ai answers:

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Chapter Four You could say it’s neither, it’s just this guy being bored. To me it’s not subversive, it’s just a silly act. . . . [It is not] really destructive, it’s just an attitude. . . . I think if there is only one left in the world, if you end that tradition, that’s destruction, but if there are [one hundred] then you try to say what happens to one is a break—I think that is a discovery, not really destruction.16

Ai’s response calls into question people’s relationship to historical artefacts, but also the overdetermination of images by text. How do we know that this is really a Han dynasty urn and not a replica? Would knowing about the authenticity of the artefact change our interpretation of the work of art? It is this reverence for the authentic historical object, meant to be collected and displayed behind glass, cut off from its context and ensconced in the collector’s passion, that is being challenged here. It is not that this artefact is not worthy of respect, but rather why this particular form has become symbolic of a certain aesthetic value. To make this point more bluntly, in the same interview Ai opposes his experiments with ancient Chinese artefacts as being respectful to the Taliban’s hateful acts of destruction (for instance, the dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in March 2001). In both cases we face utterly political art: one is pure propaganda and the other enters the most prestigious galleries of contemporary art. While, on the one hand, this comparison itself is a typical Ai Weiwei provocation, on the other, it allows him to expand his larger philosophical project about aesthetic judgement. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn—much like his furniture pieces such as Grapes (2010) and Table and Pillar (2002), and his Han Dynasty vase series which includes the Coca Cola Vase (2014) and Coloured Vases (2015)—makes a powerful statement about the relationship the Chinese people have with their past, dealing as it does with history, memory, preservation and value. These pieces then lead to a fundamental questioning of the birth of museums and archives in Europe in the late eighteenth century, and the ordering and documentation of the past. We know from Foucault and others that the desire to classify and establish taxonomies led to the development of tables of signs that functioned as the images of the things themselves, and the logic of this classification defined the episteme organising a society in a specific period. Ai is forging time itself by bringing ancient artefacts into museums of contemporary and modern arts but at the cost of remixing them. ‘I change the form, it’s just a different way to interpret the form’.17 These formal experimentations (shattering and pulverising vases, altering and impaling tables) provide another life to ancient objects that have lost their symbolic value or have simply been forgotten. We can think of Dust to Dust (2008), which according to Ai’s description is ‘Thirty glass jars with powder from ground

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Figure 4.4 Ai Weiwei, Grapes, 2010 (detail). Wooden stools from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 210 x 190 x 188 cm. Photo by Edna Winti / Creative Commons 2.0.

Neolithic pottery (5000–3000 BC), wooden shelving, 200 x 240 x 36 cm’.18 This piece suggests notions of codification and ordering as each identical jar, full of an identical brown dust, is arranged in a shelving system reminiscent of eighteenth and nineteenth century cabinets used for displaying scientific objects, or a Chinese medicine cabinet. To read these artworks as simply denouncing the Chinese state’s cultural policy of neglecting and destroying historic buildings and artefacts, as the Royal Academy of Arts catalogue does, would be an over-interpretation for they need a more superficial reading, or rather a reading that is more attentive to their surface. They operate as a platform to reconsider the Chinese people’s relationship with their own history and therefore their present historical condition. These artworks, and especially the famous ongoing series Coloured Vases and the Coca Cola Vase series (that was started in 1994 and

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continues with this recent Royal Academy exhibition), question consumerism but more importantly the everyday aesthetic choices that one makes in capitalist societies. The Coloured Vases series, with its insistent recurrence in Ai’s oeuvre, presents ancient vases dip-dyed in garish industrial paints and arranged in casual groups, presenting an assortment of choices on offer. These are a reflection on the ‘beautifying’ imperative of today’s hyperconsumerist society, echoing before their time Instagram’s palette of filters for photographs that make reality more technicolour than itself. While Dillon’s review gives a remarkably nuanced understanding of Ai’s art, it misunderstands these particular works. For Dillon, these are the weakest of Ai’s work, ‘all too swiftly taken in and exhausted’.19 This sense of being too readily consumed is in fact intrinsic to their appeal.

LIVING UNDER THE LENGTHENING SHADOWS A large number of articles on Ai Weiwei do not really discuss his artworks; they either publish interviews with him or quote him at length. Yet, underneath the lengthening shadows of Ai’s words stand rare, bold and majestic art pieces. Art criticism could do with a dose of amnesia about his biography, and his adoption of anti-aesthetic, poetic or techno-aesthetic stances, to assess his artworks in an ecology of images. The 2015 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London was conceived in part to facilitate this shift from the person to the artworks.20 Moreover, after his incarceration Ai has decided to be less confrontational towards the Chinese state, to the disappointment of American and European art critics and journalists.21 Ai’s work is probably best understood as collaborative or participatory, but in ways that are not always intentional or obvious. His art contains the virtual presence of all the workers who collaborated at some stage in its production. It is almost meaningless to refer to Ai Weiwei as an artist in the singular and traditional form, but conforming to contemporary artistic practices, Ai is assisted by a large team of collaborators. Since we want to read his artworks as being social, political or ‘collaborative’, we will turn to Claire Bishop’s work on participatory art to distinguish Ai’s collaborative art from the principles of the social (re)turn in art that has taken place in the last fifteen to twenty years. Ai explains that in this, his art is post-Warholian: Especially today I think it’s unavoidable to be social and political. . . . I know very little about Beuys because I studied in the United States, but Warhol did it in his own ways: his factory, his announcements about ‘popism’, about portraits, about production, the interviews he did—nothing could be more social than that I think.22

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Ai then has a capacious understanding of art and the social, collective aspect of its production. While he always keeps visible the artisans and technicians whose skill makes his artwork possible (Sunflower Seeds and Straight both included videos that showed these men and women at work), his most clearly collaborative and social piece is the participatory art project Fairytale (June– July 2007) for the Documenta 12 art festival in Kassel, Germany, which really pushed the limits of what counts as art. As part of this project, which feels almost like a social experiment, Ai used his blog to invite individuals from China to travel to Kassel and stay there for the duration of a week. Among the thousands of volunteers who registered their interest, 1,001 were chosen by Ai to be part of the installation. Of these, many had never owned a passport or travelled abroad, some had never left their hometowns and some had never even thought of doing so. Ai selected the participants by privileging those with limited resources or travel restrictions, and funded the entire project (around four million dollars), including the travel-related expenses, with the help of different public and private funders. He organised accommodation in Kassel (an old textile mill was converted into a temporary hostel), designed travel items (clothes and luggage) and even contracted Chinese cooks.23 Accompanying these fellow travellers were 1,001 chairs made from Qing dynasty wood (1644–1911), one chair for every participant. In this post-studio practice, the social engagement is very obvious and almost paradigmatic. Ai wanted to give to a thousand persons the opportunity to leave China for a short while, something that many of them could only dream of. This participatory art project was entitled ‘fairytale’ in reference to the Grimm brothers who had lived in Kassel, but the title was also a comment on the experience of the Chinese travellers, for whom this was an unexpected opportunity that carried a heavy burden of expectation. The installation performed an intercultural exchange where these live ‘exhibits’ from remote parts of China became part of a respected forum for contemporary art. But more importantly, the participants also became co-producers in Ai’s social installation and the very material of this art project: interviews, photographs and video recordings were made with the participants, which were then included as part of the documentation of Ai Weiwei’s catalogues. However, there is a fundamental ambivalence at the heart of this art project: it is not clear what distinguishes this form of group travel orchestrated by Ai from either the packaged holidays offered by companies as competition prizes, or from the public policies of inclusion and integration that subsidise organised holiday trips for people from underprivileged backgrounds. What Ai expected from these people was that they be tourists. While they had no set agenda, they were encouraged to walk around the city, take in its sights,

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interact with the locals and visit the other exhibits that were part of the art show. They were asked to document their impressions for Ai, in diary entries and in photographs, much like tourists do. It is this ambiguity of purpose that makes the piece so dynamic, allowing for a questioning of all these dimensions, pushing at the borders of art and non-art, challenging the traditional images of the artist and the audience. Claire Bishop has provided a succinct picture of what is at stake in such participatory art pieces: [T]he artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is preconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant.24

Participatory art is art’s response to the accusations of elitism that it faces today (as discussed in chapter 1). The public funding of art has increasingly been conditioned by a demand from government agencies—in the United Kingdom this began under New Labour (1997–2010)—to use art as ‘a form of soft social engineering’ that must have a real ‘impact’ on society.25 The parallel here with the neoliberalisation of the university is striking. In these performative pieces, that are always fragmentary since they are embodied and experience-based, there is either an emptying out of political or social engagement for the sake of the spectacle, or the artwork itself is sacrificed to respond to social engagement imperatives. The discourse and practice of participatory art tends to emphasise ‘compassionate identification’ in which ‘an ethics of interpersonal interaction comes to prevail over a politics of social justice’.26 By questioning and challenging the traditional role of artist as producer, this collaborative turn in art has ‘prompted an ethical turn in art criticism’ and ‘a tacit analogy between anti-capitalism and the Christian ‘‘good soul’’’.27 By self-sacrificing, the artist ‘should renounce authorial presence in favour of allowing participants to speak through him or her’.28 The imperatives of sacrificing authorship, craftsmanship and aesthetic qualities for social engagement, as diagnosed by Bishop, complicate what we tend to call, perhaps too quickly, ‘experimental’ arts and hybrid practices. This is apparent in Ai’s Fairytale: appearing from its inception as a move away from thinking of the artwork as an object and a commodity, it is too quickly praised for making a leading art festival accessible to a large audience of non-specialists, thereby creating new social relations and social inclusion. We want to argue that Ai Weiwei’s work is both more political and more collaborative when it reflects on material qualities and on our usages of history rather than in this all-too-direct social collaboration. Participatory art is

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also usually associated with a disavowal of aesthetics (for being dogmatic in its emphasis on visuality, or for being elitist and insular), yet most of Ai’s work does not contain such an openly anti-aesthetic stance. He is very aware of art history and of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, and his work is rooted in these discourses even as he tries to pull away from them.29 His work then integrates within its very structure some of the concerns that participatory art raises. Both the large art installations and the delicately formed small pieces speak with their surfaces, making evident on their very facades other lives, work and history. Ai does not need to create participatory pieces, for his artistic practice consistently gives a social and political dimension to his work. Like his understanding of the ‘social’ nature of Warhol’s work, his own work gains from this expansive social interpretation. In this sense, even as he zooms in on himself again and again in his hundreds of Instagram selfies, his blog posts and the thousands of photos he puts online, Ai’s public persona maintains a ‘refusal of the autobiographical and confessional self’.30 In spite of his hypermediatisation, Ai remains inscrutable; he does not present the self with a profound interiority, and even in the most intimate recordings of his bodily self there is an absence of psychological depth. Sorace is then right to read these self-recordings as social archives: Ai’s ‘identity or personal life is radically exteriorised as a commentary on China’s culture, politics, and society’.31 It is about transforming the world into an exhibition space, but it also mirrors, not in an uncritical manner, the aestheticising tendencies of neoliberalism. Ai has no other purpose than making his art; it is not a profession but almost a calling which comes with a great responsibility. This responsibility is to make his art more open, more available, and perhaps this is also the reason why he constantly pushes himself into new terrains and ropes them into his artistic process. For instance, what is so striking about the 2015 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London is the relatively low number of art pieces it includes, despite being billed as the first major survey of his work ever held in the United Kingdom. This is partly to do with the scale of his large art installations, but also because these works only work in relation to the space around them. These installations need space and emptiness around them to be able to breathe, and to invite the audience to move around them and to weave their steps through them (the Tree series and Fragments are meant to be walked in). It is the topology of these installations that make his work ‘contemporary’: there is a ‘unifying character of the space produced by the installation . . . the installation is material par excellence, because it is spatial’.32 Ai’s work is democratic, not in the sense that it attempts to promote the

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worn ideas of liberal democracy (equality, free speech, etc.), but because of its openness to the audience that views it, the artisans who have made it and the context in which it has germinated. His work is thoroughly Western, approaching China from a Western perspective (after his formative years in New York) but also introducing modernist artworks to China. He demonstrates the materiality of things through the participation of other artisans and the audience into his art pieces. Following Groys, we can argue that ‘[t]he installation [for Ai] transforms the empty, neutral public space into an individual artwork’.33 His literal appeal to Western liberal values is in many ways the least interesting aspect of his work, and may be understood as ‘kitsch’ rather than ‘avant-garde’ if one accepts (like Groys) a non-elitist understanding of these values. The ‘Ai-Weiwei-isms cards’ and the merchandise that is sold in the museum gift shop (that are now an integral part of every museum) are ‘bad art’, or perhaps not art at all, but generally equivalent objects that one could find in the toy store. Ai’s Coca Cola Vase and Coloured Vases series then are responses to exactly this condition.

MATERIAL QUALITIES As Ai’s artworks dialogue with other periods of Chinese history, they also try to disclose the abstract labour that is necessary in their production. Indeed these two ambitions are intertwined in the pieces themselves in the form of the historically weighted materials that he uses to create his art. The materiality of things is often hidden by their monetary and symbolic value, and Ai plays with this in his use of materials like traditional white marble and dark ironwood which have cultural significance in China, as well as jade which continues to be an expensive and prized mineral. But his aim is not simply to reveal this materiality and its various evocations and resonances, but also to bring to the fore the process of abstracting that things and people are submitted to by capitalism. The general equivalence of things or the flat ontology of capitalism make critique and art inoperative. It is therefore productive to approach Ai’s work for its material qualities, and the attention he gives to the sourcing, the craftsmanship, the profanation and the symbolism of matter he moulds into shape. Many of Ai’s pieces have a presence that functions beyond exchange value, but also beyond simple allegories or metaphors. While works like the two exquisitely crafted jade Sex Toys (2014) and the jade Handcuffs (2011) make the visitor do a double take, their shock value lies on the surface, in their subversion of their own material’s expectations. There is humour here, and easy references to China’s lack of personal freedom and its track record

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of human rights abuses. In contrast, it is his larger, more daring projects like Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Straight (2008–2012) that are most successful in making art that is complex, honest and moving. These are works that pay homage to the skill and knowledge of the workers who are part of his team; as he puts it, ‘there is a need for such a perfect manual skill, which could be seen by some as a utopian type of practice’.34 But these works are also about the resonant materials used to fabricate them. In this they reveal Ai’s keen understanding of the history and meaning of his materials and his deft manipulation of their properties in order to question our relationship to and use of these materials. For Sunflower Seeds, Ai contracted 1,600 workers from small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen to individually make and paint by hand one hundred million porcelain seeds. It took these workers two and a half years to produce each ceramic husk, and the documentation of the thirty steps required to make these porcelain sunflower seeds was an integral part of the exhibition, first displayed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in October 2010. Much like Fairytale, this work of art was about the people from the remote town of Jingdezhen, a thousand kilometres from Beijing, who were part of generations of skilled workers from a place that was known for making China’s imperial porcelain for over a thousand years.35 These artisans were visible both in the documentation and in the distribution of the grant allocated for the realisation of the project. Originally, Sunflower Seeds was supposed to have a participatory element, with the visitors of the exhibition given the opportunity to walk on the seeds and even take some home if they wanted. However, for the benefit of public health and safety, it was decided that it was better for the audience to keep its distance. In this installation, each seed condensed the enormous labour that had gone into it and the complex process of production that has been involved in its creation, from the mining of the kaolin to the final sweep of the paintbrush. Equally, it gave a perspective on social relations in China and the West’s relation to China (especially in the way in which it riffed on the infamous ‘made in China’ label). While in capitalism, this labour is abstracted, in this work of art it is revealed and placed at the very core of the piece itself. This attention to the material of the artwork combines with traditional techniques in Ai’s furniture series to produce a thing of absurdist humour, an economical gesture that overturns the seriousness of art and the centuries of aesthetic reverence for classical art forms. The beautiful Qing dynasty tables sawed in half and put together so as to perch in corners with two legs on the wall (Table with Two Legs on the Wall, 1997), or the stools taken apart and then carefully recreated in a nimble, gravity defying circle (Grapes, 2010), take on an energy of their own. These artworks are impractical; they operate

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beyond the domain of use value. They do not function anymore as tables, benches or stools; they are re-assembled to make them inoperative, useless objects. Every production of use value in the market economy also organises uselessness: it organises what it produces (and sees as ‘useful’) and what it does not produce (seen as ‘useless’). It is in this space of counter-production that Ai Weiwei attempts to block the production and anti-production of the market by inserting his useless objects. These are objects that function, operate, intervene but beyond any use value. These wooden sculptures are also related to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, objects found and amended into art, an idea that Ai often cites in his work. At various points, Ai has referred to himself as a readymade, called the Chinese totalitarian regime his readymade and spoken of his object-based pieces as readymades. Ai’s chosen readymades, be they ancient urns or tables, already have heavy cultural significance, but by treating them as cultural voids—painting them, grinding them, piercing them, dismantling them and remaking them at odd angles—he transforms them into useless objects. They no longer have their antique patina or their aura of authenticity; rather, their value now resides elsewhere. This is not to say that they are not beautiful, for these elegant antiques have been remodelled with exacting precision born of skill and experience, each angle carefully measured. As Ai notes: It’s more like a foreign object because you don’t know its usage, but it’s made to such high quality that you can’t ignore its purpose. But what its purpose is you don’t know. I feel it’s very interesting to put a tremendous effort or art or craftsmanship into something useless or even nameless.36

In these pieces, practical objects have been rendered useless, yet they capture such beauty that they cannot be ignored. This kind of uselessness challenges the very purpose of the artwork, while drawing attention to the process of its production. This focus is central to Ai’s larger project, for he is not interested in the production of useful objects but rather objects, and art, that remind us of their technicity—a notion that lies at the heart of contemporary art. Agamben referred to the power of ‘not to do’ or ‘‘‘being able to not do,’’ being able to not exercise one’s own potentiality’,37 as an attempt to extend and redefine powerlessness or ‘impotentiality’. ‘[H]uman beings are the animals capable of their own impotentiality’:38 they are able not to act. This statement needs to be distinguished from voluntary servitude for this powerlessness as a capacity is, on the contrary, an increase in one’s capacity to act (by not acting). Acting and not acting should not be opposed but thought of as a process, where these two tendencies come and go to compose a mode of being. This is an augmentation since it is coupled with a knowledge of one’s limits, that is, the capacity to suspend one’s own power. ‘Nothing makes us

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more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality’.39 Hence the importance today to ‘opt out’, or to ‘sign off’, when enrolment has become automatised in the multitude of forms and agreements that we sign every day, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. Agamben concludes that an ‘art of ignorance’ is lacking today, in the same way that in today’s aestheticised life, an art of uselessness is lacking. It is because contemporary late capitalist societies have become hyperfunctionalist (pseudo-pragmatic or realistic) that non-knowledge, ignorance and powerlessness have become essential for resistance. It is not a coincidence if the figure of Bartleby has taken such significance in Deleuze’s late thought: Melville’s character embodies the deliberate decision not to act. Standing against nihilism and cynicism, Ai’s useless objects then, paradoxically, represent both nothingness and pure potentiality: they can be nothing, they can mean anything. While we have argued that the relationship between Ai’s artwork and his persona needs to be problematised, so that assessments of his work are not overdetermined by his person, we recognise that this is an impossible task: there is an unbroken continuum between his staggeringly scaled sculptures and his Instagram images, that his artistic practice is varied and eclectic enough to include architecture and blogging, but also that he frequently curates his own art. Two of his most recent exhibitions in the United Kingdom were curated directly, though remotely, by him. In October 2014, Blenheim Palace opened its doors to Ai’s largest UK exhibition till that point, with more than fifty artworks displayed in its aristocratic rooms and formal gardens. Working from his studio in Beijing, still unable to leave China due to his travel prohibitions, Ai directed the exhibition using photographs, detailed plans and a three-dimensional computer model of the Palace. Similarly, the ongoing exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London is curated in collaboration with Ai, who was only able to receive permission to leave China just before the exhibition opened. The exhibition was put together over ten months, during which time curator Adrian Locke visited Ai in Beijing several times and provided Ai with detailed architectural drawings, photos and a specially made film that gave Ai a virtual tour of the Royal Academy. This exhibition is then as much an exhibition by Ai Weiwei as it is on him. It is this curatorial drive that makes Ai a true contemporary artist.40

NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 137.

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2. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), p. 94. 3. Christian Sorace, ‘China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2014, p. 415. 4. Brian Dillon, ‘At the Royal Academy’, London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 19, 8 October 2015, p. 32. 5. Groys, Art Power, p. 16. 6. ‘There is not the slightest acknowledgement that the struggle for human rights is far more complex, and entails far greater subtlety and thoughtfulness about the political situation, than these universalisms. Why does this man shape so much of what the West thinks about China? Because he gives us what we want: digestible, consistent platitudes about the lack of freedom in authoritarian regimes. . . . If Ai’s art lacks sophistication, it is because he deals in reflexive irreverence for authority’. Rebecca Liao, ‘Ai Weiwei Reconsiders Himself’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 July 2015, https://lareviewof books.org/essay/ai-weiwei-reconsiders-himself (last accessed 3 August 2015). 7. Ibid. At the end of her article, Liao dismisses Ai for his rejection of the new and makes a case for China’s younger generation of artists who, embarrassed of the trouble Ai causes and resentful of his wealth and fame, ‘have left controversy behind in search of an edgy, yet apolitical, Chinese aesthetic’. Not only does this polarising of Ai with young, ‘edgy’ artists seem pointless, Liao also seems to have entirely misunderstood Ai’s political project if she thinks that his desire is to ‘seek reassurance in the old world’. 8. Sorace, ‘China’s Last Communist’, p. 405. 9. For a debate on the notion of the ‘contemporary’ in art and politics, see Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidoke (ed.), What is Contemporary Art? (Berlin: Sternberg Press/e-flux journal, 2010); Peter Osborne, Anywhere Or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013); Nathalie Heinich, Le Triple jeu de l’art contemporain: Sociologie des arts plastiques (Paris: Minuit, 1998); Nathalie Heinich, Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain: Structures d’une re´volution artistique (Paris: Gallimard, 2014); Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’ in Groys, Going Public, pp. 84–101; Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? with drawings by Dan Perjovschi (London: Koenig Books, 2013); Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’ in Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kiskik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 39–53. 10. Groys, Art Power, pp. 17–18. 11. In her novel that meditates on the obsession for collecting (antiquities, sights and sounds of Mount Vesuvius and a beautiful woman) even Susan Sontag goes back to the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance (London: Penguin, 2009). 12. David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). 13. Groys, Art Power, p. 113. 14. Ibid., p. 147. 15. ‘Give me a brain’, Deleuze writes about cinema. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 196. 16. Ai Weiwei in Tim Marlow, ‘Ai Weiwei in Conversation’, Ai Weiwei (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015), p. 20. 17. Ibid.

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18. Ibid, p. 158. 19. Dillon, ‘At the Royal Academy’, p. 32. 20. Adrian Locke, the co-curator of this exhibition explains this: ‘Ai is misunderstood in Britain to some extent, because people who know his name do not always know his art . . . this exhibition is a chance for us to understand him as an artist’. Sam Phillips, ‘Ai of the tiger’, Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, No. 128, Autumn 2015, p. 57. 21. In summer 2015, Ai gave two interviews in the German media in which he argued that the repression in China is not as bad as in the past (for instance in 1989). Some have interpreted this as a capitulation. See Ian Johnson, ‘‘‘I Try to Talk Less’’: A Conversation with Ai Weiwei and Liao Yiwu,’ New York Review of Books, 12 September 2015, http:// www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/sep/12/try-to-talk-less-ai-weiwei/ (accessed 15 September 2015). Sorace provides a more nuanced reading of Ai’s new stance and his rhetorical evasions; Christian Sorace, ‘In Rehab with Weiwei’, The China Story, 14 October 2015, http://www.thechinastory.org/2015/10/in-rehab-with-weiwei/ (accessed 15 September 2015). 22. Ai Weiwei in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai Weiwei Speaks with Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 98–99. 23. ‘Ai Weiwei, Fairytale: 1,001 Chinese Visitors’, in Nato Thompson (ed.), Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 96–97. 24. Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 2. 25. Ibid, p. 5; for the United Kingdom’s cultural policy under New Labour and its acceleration under the Lib-Con coalition government led by David Cameron (2010–2015), see pp. 13–15; on the prejudice underlying the rhetoric of funding bodies, see p. 38. 26. Ibid, p. 25. 27. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006, pp. 180, 183. For a reformulation of these themes on the ‘ethical turn’, see Bishop, Artificial Hells, pp. 18–26. 28. Ibid, p. 183. 29. ‘Yes, all my works play with art history. As a contemporary artist I can never leave the context of what contemporary philosophy and aesthetics are about, so I think I am fully aware of that. It’s like a Communist member is always aware of the flag: I’m contemporary, by definition, but I definitely speak art-historical languages too’. Ai Weiwei in Tim Marlow, ‘Ai Weiwei in Conversation’, p. 20. 30. Sorace, ‘China’s Last Communist’, p. 407. 31. Ibid. 32. Boris Groys, ‘Art and Money’, e-flux journal 24, April 2011, p. 7. 33. Ibid. 34. Ai Weiwei in Tim Marlow, ‘Ai Weiwei in Conversation’, p. 27. 35. This was the largest piece acquired by Tate Modern. ‘Because of the quantity of the seeds, 1,600 people and more are involved in the project in this town. So, that means almost everybody knows someone who is making Sunflower Seeds. Even the taxi drivers would talk about it, but nobody understands it’. Ai Weiwei in ‘Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds’, Tate Modern, 14 October 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/ exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds (accessed 7 July 2015). 36. Ai Weiwei in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai Weiwei Speaks with Hans Ulrich Obrist, p. 64.

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37. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p. 43. 38. Ibid., p. 44. 39. Ibid., p. 45. 40. ‘When it comes down to it, the independent curator does everything the contemporary artist does’. Groys, Art Power, p. 50.

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Burial’s Muffled Soundscape of London

It’s like there’s someone still holding a lighter in a warehouse somewhere. —Burial1

PRELUDE TO THE RAVE The bass is heavy and muffled, as if we are standing behind a wall, the syncopated drums arrive crawling at different paces, recalling the great times of UK garage and 2-step. The music comes from elsewhere, it could be a nightclub, it could be a warehouse, but it is definitely not from here, yet there is no epicentre, no original source where this music comes from, only the collective memory of a past—long gone—of lost futures. The few distinct words appear as if they were the most significant words we have ever heard, some whispers that demand our full attention. They are murmurs, cries, tears, we know that they are something serious, like warnings, almost like howls: the sound of an insurmountable pain. We know that this goes beyond music and sound, and certainly the music industry; these tracks express something too large for one life, but exactly what, is never certain. These tracks are neither about a singular objective meaning, a singular signification, nor about subjective interpretations—different people find different meanings or experience them differently—on the contrary, these tracks create with their impersonal forces a community, resisting whatever is trying to suppress this 87

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creation. There is a hesitation as to how the track will develop, then come the distorted and glowing vocals covered in crackles. The blending of all these ingredients—heavy muffled bass, syncopated drums, glowing vocals and crackles—gives the distinctive warm sound and feel to Burial’s tracks. * * * Burial’s music emerged in May 2005 with the release of the EP South London Burroughs, the third release by the London label Hyperdub, created by Kode9 (Steve Goodman).2 Burial (William Bevan) had been making music for years but was never confident enough to either share it with other people, or to send it to a music label. When he chanced upon Hyperdub, which had started in 2000 as a webzine, Burial decided to send Kode9 ‘some budget first tunes and he played one of them on Groovetech, which was so funny’.3 So while Burial began making music because of his love of UK garage, jungle and 2-step, it was due to his encounter with the Hyperdub website that he began releasing it—‘I like the name ‘‘Hyperdub’’. It sounded dark’.4 But it was really one year later, in May 2006, with the release of his eponymous album Burial that Burial emerged on the underground electronic scene with his new sound. After listening to this album, a couple of weeks before its release, Mark Fisher wrote on his blog: Burial is the kind of album I’ve dreamt of for years; literally. . . . The Burial LP is like the faded ten year-old tag of a kid whose rave dreams have been crushed by a series of dead end job [sic]. Burial is an elegy for the hardcore continuum. . . . It is like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalised by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. Burial’s London is a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units, disappointed lovers on night buses, parents who can’t quite bring themselves to sell their rave [twelve] inches at a carboot sale, all of them with haunted looks on their faces, but also haunting their interpassively nihilist kids with the thought that things weren’t always like this. Burial’s dilapidated Afro NoFuturism does for London in the [2000s] what Wu Tang did for New York in the [1990s]. It delivers what Massive Attack promised but never really achieved. It’s everything that Goldie’s Timeless ought to have been. . . . Burial is one of the albums of the decade. Trust me.5

This quote is worth reproducing at length because of the way in which Fisher is able to speak of the affective quality of Burial’s music. Fisher dreamt of this album because it recalls the great times of rave and its after-effects, following his own trajectory from setting up the ante-accelerationist Cybernetic Culture Research Unit with Nick Land, to witnessing the dereliction of

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London as a social space, and fighting his own nostalgia for his rave vinyls that once represented everything but now he is told he should get rid of. It is the mapping of London that strikes Fisher more than anything else in Burial’s sound. It is no surprise that Burial is the soundtrack of China Mie´ville’s London’s Overthrow, the diary narrating the austerity-infused decaying and policed London: London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliche´ than a truism. This place is pre-something.6

Yet what is missing in this picture is the direction that Burial’s subdued sound takes, how its field of forces operate and move.

IN THE HEADPHONES-EAR INTERSTICE The process of listening to Burial begins in the headphones, this technical object that plugs the physical organ into a technical organ—the experience is already intimate, gesturing towards the minimal and reaching out to the gaps of the synapses. Instead of creating a melody, and finding a sustained beat, this music constantly displaces itself to find the silences, the haunting voices, the crackles, sounds of the lighter flicking and the rain falling—what Adam Harper aptly termed the ‘unquantised melody’.7 Burial’s tracks do not sound great on loud speakers, they are made to be listened to on headphones, they are ‘oneiric dance music’,8 a kind of surreal dance music whose beats have been distorted, slowed down and even at times, suspended or robbed. Some tracks (for instance, ‘Night Bus’ and ‘Forgive’ on the LP Burial) have no drums and no beat; they are atmospheric, creating space between the scattered drums that crawl through the album. These ambient tracks are an essential component to his mapping of London—like the empty familiarity of the night bus passing through the rain—while at the same time calling for the naked drums, their occasional eclipse giving a virtual consistence to them, letting them settle in. Burial wants to keep the impressions of the drums from the previous tracks in the more ambient and beatless songs. When talking about the drums of another UK garage music producer, El-B, Burial explains that what makes them both ephemeral and untimely ‘[is] not the drums, it’s the impression of the drums’.9 Listened to on headphones, fully immersed in the sound, the tracks project and extend their tentacular warmth, wrapping their lyrics around the body:

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Figure 5.1 Burial, Untrue, 2007. Photo by Hyperdub Records. Artwork by the Burial. Hyperdub, Burial.

Holding you Couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be alone Loving you Couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be alone Kissing you Tell me I belong, tell me I belong, tell me I belong10

As Adam Harper noted, Burial is a romantic,11 an anonymous and fragile persona, who introduces romantic and sentimental themes into UK underground music. Ever since the ‘second summer of love’, that is the UK rave scene in 1988–1989, electronic music, especially hardcore and drum ‘n’ bass have been associated with a male culture, and even more so with the move to jungle in the mid-1990s.12

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The search for ‘hardcore’—the buzzword and password of the time—was interpreted in different ways. At times, hardcore was lived with violence, or with the drug experience, leaving the body exhausted and zombie-like, but also, as synthesised by Burial, it meant finding alien sounds, previously unheard, producing from the darkest existential depths a surprise or what Deleuze called, a sensation in music, that would ‘render nonsonorous forces sonorous.’13 There is a gender politics underlying many of Burial’s vocals, which stand at a middle point, neither masculine nor feminine: transgendered, glowing and enigmatic.14 It is with these hybrid vocals that Burial wants to emancipate from the male-dominated electronic music scene, much like 2-step did in the late 1990s by slowing down the beat of the previous jungle; as Reynolds notes, 2-step was at 130 b.p.m. rather than the 170 b.p.m. of the frantic jungle.15 From 1997 to 2000, 2-step electronic producers specialised for a time in making abundant unofficial remixes of famous US R&B songs (those of Brandy, Destiny’s Child and Aaliyah, for example). Burial wants to keep this element in his records by borrowing, sampling, distorting and playing with female voices using the a cappella versions, so as to break away from this masculine music.16 Burial refers to the earlier times of UK garage and rave, since these tracks wanted to unite people during the period of Thatcherite austerity. Rave parties from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s functioned very differently from other ‘live’ music events, such as rock or punk concerts, and what emerged was a scene without stars and spectacle, gaze and identification. Those who sought to understand this culture in terms of a politics of usage and identity completely missed the point; the spaces which club culture occupied and transformed . . . represent a fantasy of liberation, an escape from identity. A place where nobody is, but everybody belongs.17

Burial’s music is not rave music per se, but the echo or the after-effect of rave culture. The anonymity of Burial and his desire to become his tracks comes from the displacement of the music artist as the centre of attention. During raves, instead of watching the artist(s) on stage as in a rock concert, it is the experience that matters: ‘bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energies’.18 It is an art of imperfection and singularity that emphasises the technological possibilities and the creation of the new, rather than the sacralisation of a genius by a crowd who sings as a single chorus. Rave music is pragmatic and functionalist rather than spiritual, as Reynolds notes: ‘Rave isn’t oriented around lyrics; for the critic, this requires shift of emphasis, so that you no longer ask what the music ‘‘means’’ but how it works’.19

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DEPARTING FROM NOSTALGIA AND HAUNTOLOGY The dominant literature on rave and post-rave culture, as well as dance music, in the United Kingdom is relevant not only to ‘understand’ Burial’s music, but also to answer some of the leading interpretations of Burial’s music as being nostalgic or hauntological (and these two should be distinguished with care). Although very little has been written on Burial, apart from the regular album reviews in music magazines, the music and cultural theorists who have written about Burial agree that his music is hauntological since it recalls, calls back and recurrently refers to the influence of early to mid-1990s UK garage and rave music.20 According to Fisher, Burial’s music is symptomatic of our present, that is, a collective form of nostalgia that expresses ‘a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past’, and as a consequence this collective nostalgia ‘[produces] a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience’.21 Here, we can think of the revival of vinyls or cassettes, but since the mid-2000s, and particularly in London, the ‘retro economy’ has become ever larger. In the case of Burial and dubstep, these critics argue, it is the spectre of an old musical genre (rave, UK garage, 2-step, jungle) that returns and haunts their contemporary sound. ‘Our problem . . . is not so much that we are seduced by our memories of long ago, but that we cannot produce new memories’.22 Fisher is careful to note that it is not so much a desire to come back to the early 1990s, but the formal attachment to the ‘same techniques and formulas’. Yet the collages and montages by Burial are made using computer programmes that did not exist at that former time. Andrew Lison continues this hauntological interpretation, in his essay ‘Love’s Unlimited Orchestra’, by situating Burial within a larger political and cultural landscape.23 While we agree with Lison’s analysis, we disagree with his conclusions about nostalgia and the lack of political enthusiasm. For him, Burial’s hauntological productions are symptomatic of today’s melancholic times, especially within the Left. After discussing the different meanings and uses of melancholy, mourning and loss in Freud, Benjamin, Paul Gilroy and Wendy Brown, Lison sets out his argument that Burial only looks back at the lost time of early to mid-1990s rave and techno parties, from which he is unable to turn away, making him unable to seek other, more contemporary, more positive inspirations. To Lison, Burial expresses his ‘unconscious loss of a love-object’ in his music productions.24 Although Burial refers in his interviews to this earlier milieu—that he did not know for himself but idealised through the narratives (he refers to these stories as ‘folklore’) told by his older brother and older brother’s friends—his music is

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more about paying homage to these times by doing something entirely new.25 There is no fetishism in Burial when he refers to these songs and producers from the 1990s, but all these references provide him with a sense of history and a rootedness needed to create his own sound. And since there is no disconnect between his music and his interviews (which would be worth publishing in a collected volume), this exhibited sense of history and archive is not only a way to participate in the United Kingdom’s underground electronic music culture but to demonstrate the norms of this world. While Lison provides an insightful analysis into Burial’s complex soundscapes, he has a blind spot for the novelty of Burial’s sound: the patter of rain, noises taken from video games, refrains from other tracks, snippets of film dialogues or the varied and mundane sounds of the city. Each track attempts to find the crackle that suits the situation, the city-life of the moment, using them not as cheap tricks to sell records, but to establish a living archive, a taxonomy of sounds. In this it indirectly draws from the musique concre`te movement, created by Pierre Schaeffer.26 Burial does not only mourn rave culture; he is not only the after-effect of rave culture—a kind of post-rave music. On the contrary, he intends to map the city, as the cover image of his first LP Burial shows: a darkened bird’seye picture of London, a city of lights. This cover image is there to give us a hint of Burial’s themes and remind us of how much his music is rooted in London’s streets, nights, lights, buses and rain. He does not do this to idealise his environment, his lifestyle or his city/country. His tracks become the spaces in which he composes a new environment with the listeners, track after track, movement after movement. This is a known yet discordant environment made up of rasps, rustles, purrs, cracks, whirs and pops that make up the life of the city. While his absence from the music scene can be interpreted as a kind of mourning of, or retreat from, the music world, we argue that on the contrary, Burial’s absence from ‘music events’ is a kind of hospitality or invitation to organise, mobilise and share. A track like ‘Night Bus’ can be seen as a kind of jingle that allows the army of workers to accept their fate of exploitation and meaninglessness; worse, it could be understood as deliberately avoiding any kind of resistance to the flows and tentacles of capital. But, moving away from these pessimistic interpretations, we read Burial’s absence from the music scene as a gesture of humility, a resistance to the music industry that commodifies affects. Burial does not seek a refuge, an autonomy or an emancipation from the music industry, but instead he creates a texture between people’s solitary lives. It is a music that begins in isolation rather than finishes there. It is through the startling effect of his compositions that people finally come together, not yet ready to make the event, but to create at least

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a site for sharing and multiplying both personal and impersonal affects. Nothing else can summarise better his music than utopia and the permanent creation of the future. ‘Infinite music’ or ‘Future UK Garage’ stand as relevant names for a music that is always to come since it prefigures a new world, while participating in its creation. Burial’s music is in the making, just like the subjects listening to Burial are in the making.

METALLIC SOUND Burial’s tracks reflect his experiences as a listener; they are a collection of sounds, rhythms and genres that he likes: he often incorporates films and songs, by sampling a singular sound, line or vocal that then becomes blended in and covered up with crackles, muffled bass and syncopated drums. When we listen to his tracks, we also listen to his hauntological repertoire. Yet, these references are not so easily identifiable since they are morphed and fused with other elements. It is not the element as reference that matters but the composition of all the singular elements into a whole. Ultimately, it is the atmosphere and the world this composition creates that matter. Songs are temporal objects, as defined by Husserl.27 This essentially means that their recorded temporality has a material existence, even a metallic existence. They are inscribed on a specific medium, on which they have been recorded, copied and reproduced, be they vinyls and CDs on which the inscription is visible, or rendered in digital formats where the inscription is not directly visible but is nonetheless present on hard disks, and can be transferred through optic cables, mobile telecommunication networks, etc. This point about the material existence of songs is essential to our argument about the political space of art, and since music does not lend itself so easily to cultural and theoretical discourse, its political and cultural effects are often undertheorised and underdiscussed. Even when artists support political movements, listeners generally tend to differentiate between their ‘activism’ or personal involvements and their music. When we refer to Burial’s own words about how he envisages and understands his music, we make no distinction between his music and his words. But when he occasionally explains himself, Burial becomes a music theorist.28 Yet what interests us is the effects of the material presence of Burial’s tracks, how they travel and operate. It is not in themselves that they have a political existence, as if they could be autopoietic; it is their relationality, the connections that they make that are crucial. As temporal objects, they circulate and function in networks of desire, within which transductive relations take place. Therefore, we do not

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ask ‘what do these tracks mean?’, but ‘what do they do?’ and ‘what is their necessity?’. In today’s hyperconsumerist societies, songs as commodities are constantly and thoughtlessly ingested: stepping into a shop, a cafe´ or even onto the street means that we will be mobbed by competing tracks. Hyperconsumption does not and cannot work without a soundscape that is attuned to it. There is an excitement about recording one’s own voice or sounds onto artefacts that can be distributed, exchanged and broadcast in environments and milieus beyond individual reach. Songs are then transmitted to serve as platforms for all sorts of activities, desires and repressions. Songs take a life of their own; they ‘pursue life by other means’ (as Stiegler defines any technical object). Burial is obsessed with finding the right drums, particular rolling metallic drums. ‘My drums are definitely not necessarily in time . . . the moment I put drums where I think they sound good, rather than in time, they seem to have that roll, the swing of the jungle and garage tunes I love’.29 It is these crafted, imperfect parts in his drums that give his ‘rolling’ sound. But his rolling drums are not only a homage to UK garage, 2-step and a certain drum ‘n’ bass from the early to mid-1990s. They also participate in a common desire to find the eidetic drums, some forms of naked drums, slinky, metallic without being manufactured: ‘the drums are more about trying to thread sounds and vocals together, they flicker across the surface of the tune, it circles around you, it’s not just chopping you up, it’s not about the sounds being big’.30 Each set of drums is different and creates an extended repertoire of beats. This is the generosity of Burial, to present a panoply of drums, crackles and echoed vocals. But the eidetic drum sounds cold and metallic, conducting all sorts of affects; in a brilliant section that could have been written to describe Burial’s drums, Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘thought is born more from metal than from stone: metallurgy is minor science in person, ‘‘vague’’ science or the phenomenology of matter’.31 In the same way that musique concre`te was a research into sonic possibilities, conducted by identifying segments and constructing phrases (inventing a new musical grammar), Burial’s music is always in the making, always left at draft stages, rough sounds in the pursuit of the eidetic drums, the slinkiest, coldest metallic drums that will bring life to the inner landscape of contemporary dance music. Eidetic, but not perfectly in time, so that we may get lost in the track; this is why Burial does not use a sequencer (that automatically puts the beats in time) but manually inputs every single beat.32 When speaking of the track ‘Cold Stone’ by the producer El-B, Burial notes: It’s dark. That tune’s never left my head. That tune is still going around my head from the first time I heard it. And the thing about those drums: they’re still the

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Chapter Five future. It’s not a lost art—people still don’t know how to do those drums. It’s an unknown thing. It’s like the last fucking secret left in music: how you do those drums. I’ve tried. I’ve locked myself away and tried. And the thing about garage is: the more you look at it like some tech-boy producer, the less you get it. It’s not the drums, it’s the impression of the drums. I’ve done bare drums I love—but then they fall apart when some studio boy says ‘oh your snare’s too loud’. But that’s the pirate sound . . . just rollage. Not an individual drum sound, it’s something else. It’s just the spirit of it, the roll of it. The drums, they’re slinky. Cold sounding. They could go anywhere. And I know some of that stuff sounds well dated, but I love it.33

In two tracks, ‘Near Dark’ from Untrue and the unreleased thirty-second segment ‘Feral Witchchild’, Burial samples a few words from a BBC interview with the famous drum ‘n’ bass DJ, Remarc (‘The Raveguide Interview’). Remarc explains why he distanced himself from the scene due to the overdetermination of equipment in the industry instead of a focus on the quality of the tracks and the sound. Burial extracts these words: Going out . . . not in it at all . . . It’s like people’s forgetting they are making tunes.34

These words are a kind of warning and a code of conduct for other music producers who simply get fascinated by music production machines and let their creativity be subsumed by the equipment.35

UNTRACKABLE TRACKS Steve Goodman (Kode9) explains in one of his interviews that ‘Burial used to send me letters with drawings and CDRs of tunes from back in 2002. There was quite a few CDRs, actually’.36 Of these, the only drawing made public is the cover of Untrue, which represents ‘[j]ust some moody kid with a cup of tea sitting at the [twenty-four] hour stand in the rain in the middle of the night when you are coming back from somewhere’.37 No doubt some of these drawings will be collected and published at some point as a companion to his music anthology. For now, Burial has agreed to broadcast some unreleased tracks or segments of tracks on the radio or in live DJ sets (especially those by Kode9 or Four Tet), which can be found on various websites, including YouTube. Many fans have been asking for the release of some of these tracks or the full versions of the preview segments that emerged online for years in the comments sections of websites and in blog posts. Burial’s reference to pirate radios and the crackles in his records that replicate the ruggedness of the ‘pirate sound’ are not only an elegy but another contour of

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the underground world. They recall the experience of listening to a track that one will never hear again, because its name was never announced on the radio, or because the tape recorder went wrong: ‘the atmosphere in those songs; it was a miracle that you ever got to hear them’.38 These references and Burial’s taciturnity are also comments on the need to de-commodifying music, to stop trying to collect all the tracks and be possessive about them, but recognise the atmosphere, the environment of this parallel music scene. The thirty-second ‘Feral Witchchild’ segment has become a cult hit, with serious fans asking for its immediate release and even a petition that gathered seventy-five supporters.39 Goodman notes, ‘[Burial’s] music has a weird, intoxicating, obsessive effect on his fans and some writers. . . . We get a lot of abuse generally for not providing [twenty-four/seven] access to Burial’s hard drive’.40 Here it is worth remembering Boris Groys’ argument that we have moved from an era of mass art consumption, in the second half of the twentieth century, to an era of mass artistic production, using mobile phone cameras and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) to publish and broadcast images, videos and texts ‘that cannot be distinguished from any other post-conceptual artwork’.41 Many Burial fans regret that he does not participate in this mass artistic production, where billions of pictures are published and republished online every day, hours of video are uploaded on streaming websites and there is a widespread passion for collecting and sharing multimedia content (particularly on the Tumblr or Pinterest platforms). Yet these contents are unidimensional, in the sense that they have a general equivalence. The companies that have created and continue to manage these hosting services do not want to produce anything but rather absorb the rich content generated, uploaded, posted and retweeted by their users to extend the space-time continuum of the market and capture the attention, the drives and the consciousness of the same users. ‘Maybe speech and communication are rotten. They are thoroughly permeated by money. . . . The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control’.42 Burial’s tracks circulate to draw the contours of London’s underground music; they respond to the hyperconsumerist attitude and its production line by refusing to participate in the channels of marketing. The detractors would of course argue that this absence is the best form of marketing, but those who make this argument have been thoroughly imbued in ideology, in cynicism. Burial wants his tracks to take a life of their own. ‘I like Underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light’.43 With Untrue, something intensified in his music: he introduced new movements and shorter tracks (‘Endorphin’, ‘In McDonalds’, ‘Dog Shelter’,

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‘UK’), creating a much faster pace than his first album Burial, even though they both have thirteen tracks with a fifty-two to fifty-three minute running time. In Untrue, ‘Shell of Light’ contains two movements, first the song itself and then the after-effect of the song. This is the first time that Burial decides to split a track into two parts, and a technique that he develops further five years later in his EPs Kindred (2012), Truant (2012) and Rival Dealer (2013). Contrary to the first two albums, these EPs have not yet received the attention that they deserve. These three short albums have a running time of between twenty-five and thirty minutes each, but most tracks last between eleven and thirteen minutes, giving him time to expand his method of producing different movements in each track. Burial first experimented with this format in 2011 in his remixes of Massive Attack, where the EP included two tracks, ‘Four Walls’ and ‘Paradise Circus’, of twelve minutes each. From 2011, the purpose of the tracks has changed: Burial now takes us on a cruise in search of the eidetic drums. He wants us to witness his craft. This is particularly true for Truant, in which he seems never to be satisfied with the beats that he posits: he starts a beat, then gets impatient and skips to a new one, in his attempt to get as close as possible to the darkest, slinkiest sets of drums that roll, encircling us, creating a new landscape. After the release of Untrue, Burial had become suddenly more famous and his music more recognised, but this led him to retreat completely from the media and from releasing new material. Between 2008 and 2010, he released only one track on his own (‘Fostercare’ for Hyperdub’s five-year anniversary compilation), taking a three-year break to prepare for his new work. His return was marked with the release of three tracks on his EP Street Halo (2011), where the last song ‘Stolen Dog’ introduced different variations within it, while keeping the same beat throughout. But 2011 was the year of collaborations for Burial, with well-known artists such as Four Tet, Thom Yorke and Massive Attack.

AFTER UNTRUE, IN SEARCH OF THE NEW The bits of space that Burial produced have travelled through devices, cables and networks to create an avowable community of listeners. The tracks stand in themselves as vestiges of UK garage, past desires and past futures that are reactivated, remixed and reincorporated into new forms. Burial’s music belongs to the short and successful dubstep movement that began in Bristol and London in 2004/2005 and spread throughout the world. Other genres of music (rock, hip hop, but also some Asian fusion music, for instance) have incorporated dubstep as a way to mark their actuality and the contemporane-

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ity of their sound. Burial belongs to the dubstep movement yet his music already moves beyond dubstep, especially in its most manufactured and pastiched versions. Some call his music ‘post-dubstep’, as if as soon as dubstep was coined, recognised and banked on, his music resisted classification and floated over the genre to find an existence of its own, looking both backwards and forwards. Burial’s tracks question the viability and the durability of dubstep as a genre, and attempt to pierce through its most simplistic and shrill tones to find a new universe made of singularities, dark beats and skips. His songs are a resistance to the present: in 2007, his second album Untrue was acclaimed by the press and the industry (it was nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize), yet instead of surfing the wave of success and responding to the expectations that were created by the album (promos, pictures, interviews, concerts, remixes, etc.), Burial went silent and absent. He withdrew in order to keep a space for his music and isolate it from the risks of celebrity and fandom (although he released in 2007 two little known remix tracks with the popular rock band Bloc Party and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke). It was only four years later, in 2011, that the Street Halo EP was released without any publicity and little attention from the press. This was the first phase of his later work, consisting in long and complex pieces that intensify and reinforce the crackles and fragility of Burial’s characteristic sound. This long break was significant for the development of his music. But this development was also extremely challenging since not only was dubstep reaching a more mature phase—as austerity politics spread throughout Europe, the drilling and shrilling sounds of dubstep became harsher, louder and increasingly unbearable, as if one had to suffer even while listening to music—Burial’s own music was being pastiched and imitated. ‘Street Halo’ still bore similarity to the tracks found on the two albums, Burial and Untrue, but the next three EPs, released in March 2012, December 2012 and December 2013, are the most fully accomplished metamorphoses. Most of the tracks on these three EPs are more than ten minutes long, with several internal movements and dynamic tensions. The new morphology of these tracks signal a rupture in his work, at attempt to find a new way of composing. While they are not entirely different from some of his Untrue tracks that also at times contained different segments, by making the tenminute tracks the norm, they have become more distinct, more intricate in the ways in which they contain several moods and phases. In fact, on BBC Radio 1, Kode9 explained how much he helped Burial in the production of his tracks: Basically the way it works is: [Burial] makes these little [twenty]-minute segments spliced together . . . [ten, fifteen, twenty] tunes. And I’ll go through, picking the

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ones I like. We’ll cut those out, and he’ll build those into tracks . . . go through about twenty different names . . . we’ll listen to it as a whole. It just works like that really, like ping-pong.44

These later tracks are stories rather than regular tracks in the tradition of UK garage and electronic music: they are more demanding, and it is in their progress and development that they stand apart from Burial’s early work. The beats are clean and trenchant, as in the beginning of ‘Kindred’, where the first beat is razor sharp, cutting through the thickest clouds. The beat is characteristic of Burial’s sound, but also goes beyond it with its clarity and fast execution. The B-side tracks ‘Loner’ and ‘Ashtray Wasp’ are even more experimental since they have an upbeat and club-like feel, yet they are dance songs ‘that wants to be danced but cannot be’.45 The keyboard from the early 1990s haunts both tracks, coming and going, accompanying and giving consistency to these two tracks, and the tracks to come. Burial has now moved to a multiplication of short segments within the tracks, breaking them into attempts, with ever shorter life spans. He builds an ambient sound and then cuts it short with other beats, as if the constant search for a sharper beat has now become obvious in the form of the tracks themselves. The elongated tracks break with the normal structure of a dance or electronic track, with an intro, a melody, a chorus and a faded conclusion. In these new tracks, the beat is set up, then abandoned, to set up another temporary architecture where our becoming can find a refuge for a little while. The end of ‘Truant’ is characteristic of this flickering and constant metamorphosing. The power and the operability of these tracks lie in the skips, the cut-ups, the breaks, the reworkings, the turning away from previous beats. It is a constant move forward, and an escape from the atrophying and manufactured dubstep beats. Burial presents not ‘copies’ of dubstep beats but some kind of ‘kaleidoscopies’, an explosion of beats, interludes and haunted voices to open up the musical space to new hybrid liaisons. There is no pure dubstep beat, no pure post-dubstep beat and even less a pure ‘Burial beat’, we are told, but displacements, a furthering of life by other means, a constant continuation. Yet ultimately to what end? These multi-layered compositions work to enlarge sympathies. But how? Some of the tracks in Untrue presented beatless ambient endings; the last track, ‘Stolen Dog’, on Street Halo works in the same way, but the end of ‘Ashtray Wasp’ on Kindred uses some simple warm piano notes and several sets of beats that dialogue with each other on a different plane, wrapping up the song softly around its listener while keeping with the depths and the multi-dimensional composition of the EP as a whole.

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The EP Truant (2012) opens with a sound probably taken from a video game used either when superpowers are gained or when the character is resuscitated. To continue with the theme of metamorphosis, this opening suggests that Burial’s music has reached another level, this is an EP that arrives after the death of other music (including his own tracks that he sometimes finds not fully accomplished). Then wind chimes, a slow beat and a simple ambient melody come in. The beat and the melody seem to be displaced by the wind that is rendered palpable by the wind chimes. The track is stripped to its bare essence and each element—the beat, the ambient melody and the dark bass—are singled out as if they were standing next to each other and were waiting to be combined in all sorts of ways. Infinite possibilities are held in suspension for a moment; these are not hesitations but an attempt to include the listener in the track. The listener is asked to produce the track with Burial, to choose a pattern among the multitude of beats. It is a resistance to the commodification of music that intends to make the most out of two-second loops. The track ‘Truant’ presents a multiplicity of beats—each lasts for a few seconds before being violently cut by the intrusion of a new beat—that will be destroyed once again by another attempt, and so on. This method of skipping corresponds very well to the ethos of zapping, cutting and pasting that dominate the contemporary moment (the time of television and digital devices that constantly solicit shorter and shorter attention spans). These tracks demand attention from the listener, they are about the skips, the flickering, the reaching out towards an infinity of breaks, while at the same time losing the listener in a chaotic environment: ‘I’m not into big intros. . . . I like tunes that just dive straight in, there’s a jump off and once you’re in it, the awareness of that you’re two minutes into a tune, or four minutes into a tune is gone’.46 So while this idea of losing the listener is not new in Burial, it was only actualised with this new format of longer tracks from 2012 and 2013. Unlike the traditional techno track that works layer by layer, first a very strong neutral beat, then cymbals, snare drums, to finally reveal the simple chorus with a woman’s voice, Burial presents all his elements straightaway but makes them stand apart to show the variations produced. The bass is loud, obscure and distinct, as Leibniz-Deleuze would have it. Perhaps this track is the ultimate work of Burial, falsifying, forging UK garage beats to infinity. The last fifteen seconds of the track are the complete opposite of the beginning, extremely demanding, very dark and harsh, almost in a suicidal way. It is not that UK garage is dead, but Burial kills it, perhaps in an act of sabotage. Again, the last minute of the second track of Truant, ‘Rough Sleeper’, ends on a complete metamorphosing of the beat, ever changing, never stable, full of possibilities to be finally brutally cut. Complete darkness.

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One year later, the story is continued. The Rival Dealer EP (2013) carries on in many ways the idiosyncratic composition of Truant, but with more accentuated positions and direction. It starts with the sound of graffiti cans and faded breakbeat that is totally swept away by some strong skips and a loud siren. Then comes one of his heaviest bass, entirely saturated with a syncopated beat that is running behind it. It is also a return to the analog: the listener cannot simply get to the exact moment of her favourite part/song, but has to wait for the song to get to the movement that moves her the most. There is no shortcut. Eventually, Burial could have made all these EPs into one track, with different movements, swimming into a larger whole, where every hearing is different. While in Burial, the repetition of the beat was there to accentuate the darker side of the tracks, a kind of integrity, these latest tracks are searching for new grounds. The vocals in the first movement of the tracks ‘Truant’ and ‘Rival Dealer’ for instance are sensational without being sensationalist: ‘I fell in love with you . . .’cause you are the one’ (‘Truant’), ‘I want to love you more than anyone’ (‘Rival Dealer’). In ‘Rival Dealer’, this romantic first part then leaves its place for one of the darkest sounds that Burial produces, signalling a kind of breakdown, a crisis; the bass is too loud but the drums are still dancing, rolling and jumping, continuing to search for the perfect sound, that is both extremely light and simple but also complex and irreproducible. Finally, ‘Rival Dealer’ opens on an ambient track, paying homage to Brian Eno, with some voices, ‘I’ve been watching you . . . I wanna be you . . . I love you’, metamorphosing into a Disney melody to finally finding an ambient depth. This kind of skip, from a dark junglist movement to a flat but intense ambient movement, is characteristic of the kind of breaks and total ruptures that are contained within each longer song. The next track of the EP (‘Hiders’) turns to 1980s rock music but never manages to stabilise, never repeating the melody or the central chorus. ‘Hiders’ is probably the most original track that Burial has done since Untrue and was widely recognised as such by the reviews at the time of its release. It opens a new genre of music (1980s pop-rock) to his repertoire, but not in a sustained manner. The occasional 1980s drums and keyboards are there to signal directly to other genres as possibilities for his experiments with crackles and distorted voices, by allowing the bass and the drums to pay homage to other forms of sounds. Burial creates a taxonomy of genres of drums and bass, integrating other genres to his project, to ‘burialise’ even 1980s poprock. His constant variation, the increasing impatience and flickering his tracks put forward, make him more in tune with today’s London than with any other genre of music. He defies categories, packaged listening experiences, to become the name of a utopian impulse in music. Every single track

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of his is a contribution to the vitality of music, its infinitude, to push music to new terrains and not to get stuck. HARDCORE CONTINUUM REDUX With the original publication of Energy Flash and other articles for The Wire that followed and were later added to the book, Simon Reynolds invented the term ‘hardcore continuum’ to refer to this rave and post-rave subculture (drum ‘n’ bass, UK garage, jungle, breakbeat, 2-step, speed garage, grime, dubstep, wonky, etc.). ‘Hardcore’ was a password combining the desires and attitudes to push individual, technological and social possibilities forward, at times with the use of drugs, but at others with ‘a smidgeon of underclass rage’.47 Reynolds called it a ‘continuum’ because of the range and diversity of music genres, ‘negotiating significant changes in technology, drugs and social/racial composition of its own population’.48 This notion of ‘hardcore continuum’ is interesting since it allows us to think of diverse electronic music genres as constructing a tradition with norms and customs (anonymity against authorship, pirate radios as the infrastructure, clubs and warehouses as social hubs, underground reviews and blogs, etc.). Although Reynolds does admit his disillusion with contemporary electronic music as being in love with its past (what he called in another context, ‘retromania’), as being fragmented, entropic, facing a deadlock and an outright retreat, it is Mark Fisher who gave popularity to this term by integrating it into his hauntological interpretation following his listening of Burial.49 The identification of this hardcore continuum (or ‘nuum’) has led Fisher to denounce the lack of creativity and invention in electronic music of the 2000s and beyond. These questions became central in specialist circles, and as the musicologist Adam Harper remarked, this debate on ‘the new’ in music is ‘epoch-defining’ in contemporary music criticism.50 In order to prove his argument about the end of creativity in contemporary music (compared to that of the 1960s to 1990s which produced countless music genres), Fisher explained this counter-factual, veil-of-ignorance-like scenario that he called the ‘past-shock’ test: If it were possible to have played someone in 1988 a Jungle track from only four years later, it would have struck them as bewilderingly, unplaceably new. Yet if you played them a Wonky or a Funky track from 2008, the chances are that they would only have been mildly discomfited; in fact, they might be shocked that the music of twenty years in the future was still so recognisable.51

To Fisher, contemporary music (especially dubstep, or more recently Wonky or Funky) is ‘all too comprehensible’ since ‘we are still in the same sonic

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phase space established a decade and a half ago’.52 This debate has been very successful in academic and para-academic circles, enacting and re-enacting the end of art (from Hegel to Adorno and back) and Jameson’s thesis about pastiche as the new mode of artistic expression in postmodernism. Fisher’s own relation to this debate is intimate since he could not accept the closure of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit or the dying out of experimental dance music (both as events and music productions). Yet there is a whole process of archiving at work now with YouTube giving access to an ever larger sense of historicity, and so preparing for new genres of music. Adam Harper’s argument stands as the complete opposite of Fisher’s own position: with the development of electronic music from the 1980s onwards, it is now technologically possible to produce musical novelty to the infinite, establishing a new modernism beyond prescriptions.53 The argument about musical superabundance with the digital consumption and production of music has led some to consider how we can create the conditions where it is possible to be affected again by music.54 Yet, our own understanding of the 1990s UK garage is ever-expanding with its documentation and archiving, and perhaps there is always a delay at work between the creation of experimental or expressionist artworks and their reception.55 Therefore, what Fisher misses is the role of the audience as well as that of musical events. There have been real transformations in the way people relate to music socially and technologically.56 His theses about newness are situated at the intellectual level, tied to the argument that there have been no major innovations comparable to jazz, rock, funk and hip hop in popular music, but only a recycling of the same flavours with an increasing commodification. Curiously, it is Burial’s music that has led him to develop this argument of the impossibility of breaking away from the same sonic space as the hardcore continuum. As he explained in an interview, he first started thinking of melancholia as being the real sound of contemporary London after listening to Burial’s first album, and this led him to develop a theoretically sustained argument about the cancellation of the future not only in music but also in politics.

BECOMING ‘THE NAME OF A TUNE’ AND THE UNDERGROUND CONDITION The desire to be both anonymous and discretised as ‘the name of a tune’ is central to Burial’s music. Burial does not simply want to produce underground tracks, but he also wants to explain how this underground culture works. He does not simply want to participate in it and therefore create it,

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but he explains the rules, the norms and the codes that make up this universe. When Burial explains that he wants to be unknown, he justifies this by pointing out his own relationship to the artists and the tracks he likes: Most of the tunes I like, I never knew what the people who made them looked like, anyway. It draws you in. You could believe in it more. . . . I just want to be in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune . . . it’s not like it’s a new thing. It’s one of the old underground ways and it’s easier.57

We could be tempted to read Burial’s sound and words as the will to autonomy, to exclude oneself from society and find refuge in the space of the underground, and in the concrete space of the records. Much like the widespread discussion on autonomy and art suggests, there can be no pure autonomy, only heteronomy, and Burial knows this. To draw the contours of the underground space of UK electronic dance music is not to either mourn it or to reject everything else. In fact it is quite the reverse: I see so much hope in those tunes, even the darkest of those tunes, jungle tunes and all that. In the UK—‘cos that’s all I know—those tunes tried to unite people. I want to let those people know that they didn’t fail. Because to some people, those tunes mean everything.58

His tracks express a certain mode of living, a mode of listening, a mode of cultivating singularities. It is the attempt to overcome the nihilist and cynical impassable horizon of our time:59 a resistance to the entropic becominghomogeneous of music. This resistance cannot exist without the invention and the creation of other spaces where free creativity can take place. Such is the spatial politics of Burial, the expression of the desire to continue, for ‘we must go farther than all possible horizons’.60 In many of Burial’s tracks, the voices that are extracted from other songs, films or video documents, insist on the existence of another world, the UK underground electronic music scene. These words seem to be addressed to teenagers who go through existential crises and are trying to find their own identity: don’t be afraid to step into the unknown . . . let yourself go, don’t be afraid . . . This world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, other worlds, previously unimaginable . . . who are you? . . . why would you come to me?61

Burial defines the ontology of UK garage, the dream album that ‘you’d put on if you were having the last party on earth’.62 Like in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, except, instead of making a symbolic shelter with wooden

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sticks, we would be playing a record and dancing to UK garage while waiting for the apocalypse.

NOTES 1. Burial in Dan Hancox, ‘Only five people know I make tunes’, The Guardian, 26 October 2007. 2. Steve Goodman’s own biography is interesting. He completed a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Warwick in the mid- to late 1990s, when Nick Land was still heading the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), before resigning in 1998. Members of the CCRU were studying together and sharing thoughts about French poststructural theories, rave culture, psychedelic experiences, cyberfeminism, postmodernism, posthumanism and afrofuturism. Although the CCRU was not officially affiliated to the University of Warwick and produced very obscure texts, its cultural effects are still alive today in the form of speculative realism and accelerationism. Some of the members of CCRU are now very well known in philosophy and cultural studies: Mark Fisher, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Robin Mackay, Luciana Parisi, Reza Negarestani and Hari Kunzru, among others. Steve Goodman (Kode9) explained: ‘I remember coming across one of Nick’s articles called ‘‘Cyberspace Anarchitecture and Jungle Warfare’’ at some point in the mid-[1990s]. This was a moment at which we were all massively stimulated by jungle not just as a music, but as a theory-generating machine. The article had nothing in particular to do with jungle music in a literal sense, but the more I read it, the more this abstract landscape that it seemed to be mapping was exactly the same one created by the music’. Steve Goodman quoted in Mark Fisher, ‘Nick Land: Mind Games’, Dazed & Confused, May 2011, http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games (accessed 5 July 2014). 3. Burial in Martin Clark, ‘Soundboy Burial: An interview with Burial’, Blackdown (blog), 21 March 2006, http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/soundboy -buria l.html (accessed 23 October 2014). For a comprehensive discography and bibliography (up until summer 2014), see Marcod’s blog: http://marcod.tripod.com/burial.html (accessed 23 October 2014). 4. Burial in Clark, ‘Soundboy Burial’. The content of Hyperdub’s website (closed in 2005) is now hosted by a Canadian website riddim.ca, see http://www.riddim.ca/?p 287more-287. The content is described thus: ‘Concept engineers Steve Goodman, Martin Clark, Kodwo Eshun and Dr. Mark De’Rosario, among others, were responsible for a total of [twenty-nine] articles and interviews through which the various millennial strains of mutant Garage were observed and theorised’. This content deserves to be published in book form to document this extremely rich exchange of ideas and theorisation, before the explosion of dubstep as a popular music genre. Burial’s own inspiration also comes from the texts written by Steve Goodman (Kode9). This resembles the trajectory of the French new wave film directors who were first journalists for Les Cahiers du cine´ma before they turned to making films. 5. Mark Fisher, ‘London After the Rave’, k-punk (blog), 14 April 2006, http://k-punk .abstractdynamics.org/archives/007666.html (accessed 10 June 2014); reprinted in Mark

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Fisher, Ghost of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014), pp. 98–100. 6. China Mie´ville, London’s Overthrow: November-December 2011 (London: Westbourne Press, 2012), p. 14. 7. Adam Harper, ‘The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator’, Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics (blog), 3 December 2009, http://rougesfoam .blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/premature-burial-burial-pallbearer-vs.html (accessed 7 July 2014). 8. Fisher, ‘London After the Rave’, p. 98. 9. Burial in Clark, ‘Soundboy Burial’. 10. This is the chorus from Burial, ‘Archangel’, Untrue (Hyperdub, 2007). 11. Adam Harper, ‘The Premature Burial’. 12. Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 57. For an early study of the arrival of jungle, see Benjamin Noys, ‘Into the Jungle’, Popular Music, Vol. 14, No. 3, October 1995, pp. 321–32. 13. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 57. 14. ‘I like pitching down female vocals so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl singing. It can sound sexy as fuck’. Burial in Mark Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial: Unedited Transcript’, The Wire, 286, December 2007, http://www .thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-transcript (accessed 3 March 2014). At the end of the last track ‘Come Down to Us’ from Rival Dealer EP (2013), Lana Wachowski’s powerful speech about being transgender is sampled. 15. Reynods, Energy Flash, p. 559. 16. ‘[G]irls love the dark tunes too. I understand that moody thing, but some dance music is too male. It’s dry, some jungle tunes had a balance, the glow, [and] the moodiness. . . . [W]ith my new album—blokes might be, like ‘‘what the fuck is this?’’ But hopefully their girlfriends will like it’. Burial in Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial’. 17. Antonio Melechi, ‘The Ecstasy of Disappearance’, in Steve Redhead (ed.), Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993), p. 37, quoted in Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 28. 18. Reynolds, Energy Flash, p. xxix. 19. Ibid. 20. Adam Harper, Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human MusicMaking (Alresford: Zero Books, 2012); Mark Fisher, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2013), pp. 42–55; Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my Life. 21. Fisher, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle’, p. 45, emphasis in the original. 22. Ibid., p. 46. 23. Andrew Lison, ‘Love’s Unlimited Orchestra: Overcoming Left Melancholy Via Dubstep and Microhouse’, New Formations, Vol. 75, 2012, pp. 122–39. 24. Freud quoted in Lison, ‘Love’s Unlimited Orchestra’, p. 124. 25. ‘My older brother loved tunes, rave tunes, jungle, he lived all that stuff, and he was gone, he was on the other side of the night, almost. He was the one who wasn’t back, he was out there, going to places. He’d tell us stories about it. We were brought up on

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stories about it. Leaving the city in a car and finding somewhere and hearing these tunes, and he’d bring them back. He would sit us down and play these old tunes, and later on he’d play us ‘Metropolis’, Reinforced, Paradox, DJ Hype, Foul Play, DJ Krystl, Source Direct and techno tunes. When you’re younger that stuff blows your mind. . . . I’ve never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it. My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to me and I couldn’t believe I had ‘em. It was like when you first saw Terminator or Alien when you’re only little. I’d get a rush from it, I was hearing this other world, and my brother would drop by late and I’d fall asleep listening to tunes he put on’. Burial in Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial’. 26. Schaeffer’s two notable contributions to music theory and practice are his conception of ‘musical objects’, and creating several research groups on music and sounds, especially when he founded and directed the research department within the French national public broadcasting organisation RTF from 1961 to 1975. 27. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. IV: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Bernet, trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). 28. This is a point made by Deleuze: ‘In talking [great cinema authors, great painters or great musicians] become something else, they become philosophers or theoreticians’. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 268–69. 29. Burial in Clark, ‘Soundboy Burial’. 30. Burial in Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial’. 31. ‘In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognisable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model’. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 454. 32. Burial in Burial and Kode9, ‘The Official Interview of Burial’, Dub-O-Rama, November 2007, http://www.dub-o-rama.de/interview_burial.htm (accessed 9 July 2014). 33. Burial in Clark, ‘Soundboy Burial’. 34. Burial, ‘Near Dark’ Untrue (2007); Burial, ‘Feral Witchchild’ (2007). 35. This is also at the core of a manifesto written by another electronic music producer, A Guy Called Gerald, see ‘A Manifesto for the Original Art Form of Electronic Dance Music Production’, Guy Called Gerald (blog), 17 May 2012, http://www.guy calledgerald.com/blog/a-manifesto-supporting-the-original-art-form-of-dance-music-pro duction/ (accessed 17 October 2014). 36. Lisa Blanning and Steve Goodman, ‘Revolution9: An Interview with Kode9’, 14 May 2013, http://www.electronicbeats.net/revolution9-an-interview-with-kode9/ (accessed 17 October 2014). 37. Burial in Burial and Kode9, ‘The Official Interview of Burial’. 38. Emmy Hennings, ‘Burial Interview’, Cyclic Defrost, 24 November 2007, http:// www.cyclicdefrost.com/2007/11/burial-interview-by-emmy-hennings/ (accessed 23 October 2014). 39. ‘‘‘Feral Witchchild’’ needs to be finished and released’, change.org, https://www

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.change.org/p/burial-william-emmanuel-bevan-feral-witchchild-needs-to-be-finished-and -released (accessed 1st October 2014). 40. Lisa Blanning and Steve Goodman, ‘Revolution9: An Interview with Kode9’. 41. Groys, ‘Art and Money’, p. 6. 42. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 175, translation modified. 43. Burial in Burial and Kode9, ‘The Official Interview of Burial’. 44. Kode9, ‘Hyperdub Showcase BBC1xtra 20/2/09’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?vxvHC-7vqfUk (accessed 30 June 2014). 45. Lison, ‘Love’s Unlimited Orchestra’, p. 132. This is a fundamental point made by Andrew Lison, however as we explained earlier, our conclusions diverge. While for him, in Burial’s music ‘there lurks this intense desire to be a part of something that one is unable to be’, we argue that, on the contrary, Burial wants to go beyond this to create his own space and its diagram. 46. Burial in Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial’. 47. Reynolds, Energy Flash, p. xxvi. 48. Simon Reynolds, ‘Hardcore Continuum: An Introduction’, The Wire 300, February 2013, http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on -the-hardcore-continuum_introduction (accessed 20 October 2014). 49. Reynolds, Energy Flash, pp. 646–47. 50. Adam Harper, ‘Musical Radicalism beyond the Sonic?’, Paper delivered at the University of East London, 23rd May 2012, http://rougesfoam.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/ musical-radicalism-beyond-sonic-talk-at.html (accessed 23 October 2014). See for instance the 2013 roundtable ‘Death of Rave’ with Mark Fisher, Alex Williams, Steve Goodman, Lee Gamble and Lisa Blanning, CTM Festival 2013, https://soundcloud.com/ ctm-festival/ctm13-death-of-rave-1-uk (accessed 23 October 2014). 51. Mark Fisher, ‘Infinity is Now: In Defence of the Hardcore Continuum’, Fact Magazine, 2nd February 2009, http://www.factmag.com/2009/02/02/infinity-is-now-in-de fence-of-the-hardcore-continuum/ (accessed 8 August 2014). 52. Mark Fisher, ‘The Abstract Reality of the ‘‘Hardcore Continuum’’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2009), p. 125. 53. Harper, Infinite Music. 54. Rasmus Fleischer, ‘Towards a Postdigital Sensibility: How to Get Moved by Too Much Music’, Culture Unbound, Vol. 7 (2015), pp. 255–69. 55. About the discordance between the genesis of artworks and their reception, see Bernard Stiegler, who refers to an early article by Paul Klee: ‘in expressionism, years may pass between the moment of reception and its productive return, fragments of varied impressions may come back in a new combination, or even old impressions reactivated after years of latency by more recent impressions’. Klee in Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), p. 33. 56. In the last ten years, almost 50 percent of night clubs have closed down in the UK, ‘[t]here are now [in 2015] 1,733 compared to 3,144 ten years ago’. http://www.mixmag .net/read/number-of-clubs-in-the-uk-have-almost-halved-since-2005-news (accessed 10 September 2015). 57. Burial in Fisher, ‘Interview with Burial’. 58. Burial in Hennings, ‘Burial Interview’.

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59. Already in 1983, Jean-Luc Nancy called the impossibility or the condemnation of communism the ‘unsurpassable horizon of our time’, inverting Sartre’s famous expression. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 8–9. 60. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 9. 61. Burial, ‘Come Down to Us’, Rival Dealer (2013). 62. Burial in Hennings, ‘Burial Interview’.

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Following from the four studies, we want to conclude by showing how the work of each artist considered here resonates with the other, and how we can find commonalities between their singular artworks. Although these different unconventional artists are not necessarily representative of their own field, each of them works at creating a space for politics in every one of their artworks and their oeuvre as a whole. The space that interests us is both a physical space but also a conceptual space, and these two ‘types’ of spaces should not be opposed. The Dardenne brothers respond to critical contemporary issues by creating a distinct urban landscape with political sensibilities within their films, and Burial maps out London’s soundscape by recording affects and experiences particular to the city. On the other hand, Ai Weiwei and Arundhati Roy create this space not by referring to the same kind of physicality or mapping, but through gaps, crevices, interstices in their works that allow for certain kinds of thinking to take place, and certain dislocations to happen. They both depict the problems of modern life in China and India, but they do so by emphasising the materiality of their work, whose very texture opens it up to the new, instead of resorting to ressentiment, cynicism or indifference. Our contention is that Ai Weiwei forges a space that allows for the putting together of the old and the new, the singular authentic and the reproducible fake, in order to make explicit political statements. In Arundhati Roy’s writing in general, and her screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones in particular, language detonates a conservative and complacent ethos to show a more vivid and varied reality that is often forgotten, sometimes violently suppressed, and for her this explosive language itself becomes the space where a new politics can be articulated. Many of her phrases and formulas are hilarious or darkly witty, yet they are not futile; they are so effective because they produce a distance between the reader and a reality that is utterly absurd. Her controlled, 111

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polychromatic sentences have three effects: first to critique and denounce a specific state of affairs, second to insist on the seriousness of the situation (it is not a laugh for laughter’s sake or for sheer mockery, but a weapon used in a battle), and third to encapsulate the possibility of a new politics, that is, a redistribution of the sayable and the unsayable, the visible and the invisible, noise and speech. The aim then was to affirm this political space by tracing the ways in which these artists reveal the politics of art, but without building or insisting upon artificial links between them. What unites them is that they all use their preferred medium to express and situate modes of being that are imperceptible, silenced in everyday politics. It is not that they turn their pre-formed material into political material, but as Rancie`re put it: At issue here is not to affirm the artist’s unlimited power of creation, nor to demonstrate the powers specific to a particular medium. Or instead: the medium at issue is not the matter on which the artist works. It is a sensible milieu, a particular sensorium, foreign to the ordinary forms of sensory experience.1

The artworks in each artist’s oeuvre present some affects, some situations that are more true than truth, more real than reality, since they break from classical oppositions: active/passive, reality/fiction. There is an interlocking of reality and fiction that projects gestures (in the Dardenne brothers’ films), humour (in Arundhati Roy), colours and shapes (in Ai Weiwei’s sculptures) and crackles (in Burial) that offer access to new possibilities. Rather than dialoguing with one another, these singular artworks and artists (who probably do not know each other) present a myriad of visual, sonorous and bodily elements that populate our imaginary. They inhabit us. Burial’s electronic music is now part of the London soundscape; for those who have listened to his music extensively, it is difficult not to think of tracks such as ‘Night Bus’ when waiting for the bus on a rainy night. They become Burial’s night bus and Burial’s rain, a poetic eerie rain connecting the army of workers who come back home at night, from their double shifts paid at the minimum wage, to London’s outer boroughs. The track ‘UK’ is not a nationalist, patriotic track, but a reminder of the distinct sound that London electronic dance music artists have created over the years, starting with Aphex Twin whose ‘Untitled’ track number three, on Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994), was sampled and reworked for this track. It is an elegy to the hardcore continuum as Mark Fisher noted in his very first review back in 2006. In the introduction, we explained that our reading was poetic, or at least, we attempted to study the poetics of these selected works of art, since it is in their very production and construction that these artworks can become most

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political and politicised; it is in this poetics that we find a politics. Artworks can take many meanings: they can be recuperated, turned around, used for all sorts of purposes, but something in them does not wither away, it is indelible. This book is about the colours, the sounds, the laughs, the hopes that these artworks contain, but it is also an exercise in reading that stops short of romanticising or sentimentalising these artworks by seeing them as contained works with rhythms internal to them, and not just speaking to a reality that lies outside them. Mark Strand explained this very well in his evocative article on the US painter Edward Hopper: The tendency to create narratives around the works of Hopper only sentimentalises and trivialises them. The women in Hopper’s rooms do not have a future or a past. They have come into existence with the rooms we see them in. And yet, on some level, these paintings do invite our narrative participation—as if to show how inadequate it is. No, the paintings are each a self-enclosed universe in which its mysteriousness remains intact, and for many of us this is intolerable.2

But it is precisely in this intolerable that art starts, in recognising both the mystery and the ambivalence of the work of art. The paintings, films, writings, sculptures and songs we encounter invite our own narratives indeed, along with the historical significance of our times and their times, but they also resist them by imposing their own images upon our reality. It is not only in the painting that the gas station is ‘Hopperized’ (Gas, 1940), as Strand puts it, but it is our very experience of encountering a gas station in the countryside in the United States, or imagining a large bourgeois country house as Terrence Malick did in Days of Heaven (1978), that has been equally and forever ‘Hopperized’.3 It is in this sense that aesthetic experience is also a poetic experience, since it physically changes and alters something in our brains, or any other organ of perception and sensation. But in the contemporary moment, we are surrounded by images from Facebook, Instagram, newspapers and advertisement billboards that change our aesthetic experience as deeply as the most complex and truly exceptional artworks. The artists we have studied respond to this economy of images in different ways, with Ai Weiwei taking to it with enthusiasm by frenetic blogging, Instagramming and tweeting, and Burial at the other end of the spectrum, retreating entirely into anonymity.

NOTES 1. Rancie`re, Aesthetics and its Discontents, p. 27. 2. Mark Strand, ‘On Edward Hopper’, New York Review of Books, 25 June 2015.

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3. Strand starts his article with this remark: ‘We don’t say it’s a gas station. By the time the gas station appears on canvas in its final form it has ceased being just a gas station. It has become Hopperized. It possesses something it never had before Hopper saw it as a possible subject for his painting’. Strand, ‘On Edward Hopper’. It is well known that Terrence Malick was deeply influenced by Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925) in making Days of Heaven (1978).

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FILMOGRAPHY Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, Rosetta (Belgium/France: Les Films du fleuve, 1999). Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, The Child (L’Enfant) (Belgium/France: Les Films du fleuve, 2005). Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, The Kid with the Bike (Le Gamin au Ve´lo) (Belgium/ France: Les Films du fleuve, 2011). Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, The Promise (La Promesse) (Belgium/France: Les Films du fleuve, 1996). Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, The Silence of Lorna (Le Silence de Lorna) (Belgium/ France: Les Films du fleuve, 2008). Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, The Son (Le Fils) (Belgium/France: Les Films du fleuve, 2002). Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (Belgium/ France: Les Films du fleuve, 2014). Krishen, Pradip, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (India: Doordarshan, 1989). Malick, Terrence, Days of Heaven (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1978). Ross, Gary, Pleasantville (Los Angeles: New Line Cinema, 1998). Vogel, Kate, ‘Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds’, Tate Modern, 14 October 2010, http://www .tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds (accessed 7 July 2015).

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DISCOGRAPHY Breakage, Foundation (Digital Soundboy, 2010). Burial, Burial (Hyperdub, 2006). Burial, Distant Lights (Hyperdub, 2006). Burial, Ghost Hardware (Hyperdub, 2007). Burial, Kindred (Hyperdub, 2012). Burial, Rival Dealer (Hyperdub, 2013). Burial, South London Boroughs (Hyperdub, 2005). Burial, Street Halo (Hyperdub, 2011). Burial, Truant (Hyperdub, 2012). Burial, Untrue (Hyperdub, 2007). Burial and Four Tet: Moth / Wolf Cub (Text, 2009). Burial and Four Tet, Nova (Text, 2012). Burial, Four Tet and Thom Yorke, Ego / Mirror (Text, 2011). Burial and Massive Attack, Four Walls / Paradise Circus (The Vinyl Factory, 2011). Twin, Aphex, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Warp, 1994). Various Artists, 5: Five Years of Hyperdub (Hyperdub, 2009). Yorke, Thom, The Eraser Rmxs (XL Recordings, 2007).

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Index

2-step, 87–8, 91–2, 103 A Guy Called Gerald, 108n35 activism, 49–50, 70, 94 Adorno, Theodor, 13, 25n1, 62–63, 65n39, 65n41, 104 aestheticisation of life, 17, 20–23, 79, 83 aesthetics, 7, 14–24, 40, 52, 79, 85n29 affect, 25n11, 88, 93–5, 111–12 Agamben, Giorgio, 16, 25n14, 82, 84n9, 86n37 Ai Weiwei, 1–4, 8–9, 17, 19–20, 25n17, 67–86, 111–13; Bird’s Nest, 68; Coca Cola Vase, 74–75, 80; Coloured Vases, 74–76; Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 73–74; Dust to Dust, 74–75; Fairytale, 77–78, 81, 85n23; Fragments, 79; Grapes, 74-75, 82; Handcuffs, 80; Sex Toys, 80; Sunflower Seeds, 67, 72, 77, 81, 85n35; Staight, 67, 69, 71, 77, 81; Table and Pillar, 74; Table with Two Legs on the Wall, 81–82; Tree, 79 amateur, 6–7, 11n20, 73 ambient (music), 89, 100–2 animality, 56, 62, 67 anonymity, 18–19, 38, 90–91, 103–4, 113 architecture, 8, 31–32, 52–56, 68, 83, 75, 100 Aristotle, 13–17 art consumption, 17, 19–20, 22–24, 72, 76, 97, 104

art criticism, 5–8, 13–14, 16, 24, 70, 73, 76, 78, 103 art production, 16–17, 19, 21–22, 25n15, 76–78 art theory, 5, 7, 13–14, 16 autonomy of art, 2, 33, 93, 105 Auge´, Marc, 38, 42, 44n26 austerity, 7, 89, 91, 99 avant-garde, 15, 21, 73, 80 Bacon, Francis, 10n16, 72–73, 84n12 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 14 Benjamin, Walter, 18, 22–23, 92 Bergen, Ve´ronique, 20, 26n31 Beuys, Joseph, 20, 76 Bishop, Claire, 5, 10n14, 76, 78, 84n9, 85nn24–28 Blanchot, Maurice, 1, 4–6, 10n18, 16; see also space of literature body, 33, 40–41, 43, 91 body-camera, 45 Burial (William Bevan), 1–4, 9, 11n14, 20, 87–113; Burial, 88, 93; Kindred, 98, 100; Rival Dealer, 98, 102, 107, 110n61; Street Halo, 108–10; Truant, 108, 110–12; Untrue, 19, 100, 106–10, 112, 117n10, 108n34; Chinese art, 68, 70, 73, 80–81 citizens’ investigation, the, 68 collaborative turn in art. See participatory art

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collecting, 72, 84n11, 97 contemporary art, 3, 4, 6, 19–22, 26n29, 72, 74, 76–77, 82–83, 85n29 curating, 6, 47, 83, 86n40 Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), 104, 106n2 cynicism, 4, 9, 35, 52, 55, 70, 83, 97, 105, 111 Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc), 1–2, 4, 8–9, 15, 20, 29–45, 111–13; Rosetta, 8, 15, 30–38, 40, 42, 43n12, 44n19; The Child, 8, 30–34, 38–40, 45n33; The Kid with a Bike, 30; The Promise, 30, 33; The Silence of Lorna, 8, 30–32, 34, 37–38, 42, 44n24; The Son, 30, 34, 45n37; Two Days, One Night, 30, 43 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 5–6, 9n1, 10n7, 10n16, 11n22, 14–16, 25n12, 29, 41, 42n2, 45n39, 62, 65nn40–43, 83, 85n15, 91, 95, 101, 107n13, 108n28, 108n31, 109n42 Delhi University, 53 design, 3–4, 8, 26n29, 77 desire, 9, 23, 30, 38, 48, 63, 94–95, 98, 103–4 drum ‘n’ bass, 90, 95–96, 103 dubstep, 9, 92, 98–100, 103, 106n4 Duchamp, Marcel, 17, 25, 82 Duhem, Ludovic, 24, 27nn48–50 Eliot, George, 19, 63n2 elitism, 4, 21, 51, 70, 78–80 emancipation, 4, 11n18, 15, 22, 91 Eno, Brian, 102 essay, 5, 49–50, 52, 62–63, 65n39 everyday, the, 20, 24, 38, 41, 51, 53, 71, 76, 112 Facebook, 19–20, 97, 113 financialisation, 1–2, 7, 17, 20, 22 Flikr, 19, 26n25, 27n41 Fisher, Mark, 11n24, 88–89, 92, 103–4, 106n2, 107nn20–22 Foster, Hal, 26n29

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Foucault, Michel, 15, 25n2, 25n11, 67, 74, 84n1 gender, 49, 91, 107n14 genocide, 59–61 gesture, 4, 7–8, 18, 22, 25n12, 30, 33, 35–36, 41–42, 112 Goodman, Steve (Kode9), 88, 96–97, 106n2, 108n36, 109n40, 109n50 Groys, Boris, 5, 7, 10n7, 16–23, 26n33, 27n43, 67, 70, 72, 80, 86n40, 97 hardcore continuum, 88, 90–91, 103–4, 112 Harper, Adam, 89–90, 100, 103–4, 107n7, 107n20, 109n50 hauntology, 92, 94, 103 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 14, 24, 104 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 24, 62 Hindutva, 58, 62 Hinglish, 53 Hopper, Edward, 113, 114n3 Humour, 33, 55–56, 68, 81, 111–12 Husserl, Edmund, 94, 108n27 hybridity, 8, 51, 53, 55, 78, 91, 100 Hyperdub, 88, 90, 98, 106n4, 109n44 hyperconsumer society, 17, 76, 95, 97 hypermediatisation, 18, 70–72, 79 idealism, 4, 18, 52, 55 ignorance, art of, 83 immanentisation, 19, 26n41 impotentiality, 82–83 Instagram, 19, 26n26, 76, 79, 83, 113 installations, 3, 9, 19, 77, 79–81 internet, 19–21 jungle (music), 88, 90–92, 95, 102–103, 105, 106n2, 107n12 Kant, Immanuel, 14–16, 24, 25n6, 25n13 Kapoor, Anish, 3 Kapur, Shekhar, 49 Klee, Paul, 5, 10n15, 109n55 Krishen, Pradip, 48, 51, 53–54; In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, 8, 48, 51,

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precarious, 8, 30, 40, 59 protest, 50–51, 56–57, 60–61 psychologising, 33, 35–36, 79

language, 4–8, 50–53, 55, 58–61, 111 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 40, 45n30 Lison, Andrew, 92–93, 107n23, 109n45 literature, 1, 4–6 London, 2, 9, 88–89, 92–93, 98, 102, 104, 111–12 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 14–15 Malick, Terrence, 113, 114n3 Maoist groups, 49, 57–61 Marcuse, Herbert, 15 Massey, Doreen, 45n30 Massive Attack, 88, 98 materiality, 1–9, 13, 22, 25, 25n12, 31–33, 35, 45n39, 56, 67–68, 79–81, 94, 108n31, 111–12 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 17 Mie´ville, China, 89, 107n6 mimesis, 14 morality, 3, 8, 31, 34, 37 mourning, 92–93, 105 multiplicity, 29, 45, 56, 59, 94, 100–101 naming, 30, 42, 56–60, 100, 102, 104–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 109n59 Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), 51 narrative, 8–9, 13, 30, 38, 41, 47, 51–52, 73, 92, 113 Naxalites, 51–52, 57, 60 nihilism, 30, 57, 83, 88, 105 non-art, 5–6, 72, 78 non-philosophy, 6 nostalgia, 55, 70, 88, 92 Operation Green Hunt, 59–60 participatory art, 72, 76–79, 81 past-shock test, the, 103 percept, 16, 41, 113 pirate radios, 96, 103 poetics, 7, 13–23, 112 poiesis, 6, 16–17 Porter, Robert, 33, 43n11 praxis, 17

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Rancie`re, Jacques, 7, 13–20, 22–23, 25n2, 112, 113n1 rave, 87–88, 90–93, 103, 106n2, 107n25 regime of art, 13–16, 18–20, 25n2 reproduction, 18, 23, 47, 53, 94, 111 resistance, 42, 51, 53, 58, 61, 63, 83, 93, 99, 105 ressentiment, 111 retromania, 92, 103 Reynolds, Simon, 91, 103, 107n12, 109nn47–49 Roy, Arundhati, 1–2, 4, 8–9, 20, 47–65, 111–12; The God of Small Things, 8, 47–48, 59, 54, 59; ‘Walking with the Comrades.’ 49, 57–60, 62. See also Krishen, Pradip Royal Academy of Arts, 68, 70, 73, 75–76, 79, 83 Schaeffer, Pierre, 93, 108 Schiller, Friedrich, 14, 25n6 self-design, 17, 20, 72 self-documentation, 72, 78, 81 Seraing, 30, 32, 34, 44n28, 45n33 sensation, 1, 16, 22–23, 45, 91, 102, 113 sensationalism, 61, 102 shame, 38, 40, 63, 65n43 Simondon, Gilbert, 22–23, 24, 27n44 Sontag, Susan, 84n11 Sorace, Christian, 4, 10n13, 70–71, 79, 84n3, 85n21 soundscape, 93, 95 spatiality, 1, 6–8, 22, 39, 41, 80, 105 spectator, 16–17, 21–22, 33, 38, 41, 73 Stiegler, Bernard, 2, 6, 10n8, 11n22, 24, 27n47, 95, 109n55 Strand, Mark, 112 surveillance, 68, 71 Tate Modern, 81, 85n35 techno-aesthetics, 1, 18–24, 71, 73, 76

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technology, 17, 22, 24, 53, 72, 91, 103–4 Twin, Aphex, 112 UK garage, 9, 87–92, 94–95, 98, 100–1, 103–6 underground culture, 9, 88, 93, 97, 103–5 utopia, 81, 94, 102 van Trier, Lars, 105 vandalism, 3

voice, 30, 41, 44n19, 47, 49–50, 52, 60, 89, 91, 95, 100–2, 105 Warhol, Andy, 76, 79 Warwick, the University of, 106n2 weak images, 20, 26n28, 71 Western audience, 70, 80 Wikipedia, 19 writing, 5, 47–49, 56 YouTube, 19, 26n24, 96–97, 104

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